The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492-1898) [1 ed.] 1138092959, 9781138092952

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
List of
Contributors
Between colonialism and coloniality: Colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies today
Introduction
The invention of the Latin American and Caribbean colonial period
The Latinx Americanization of colonial studies
Colonial Latin America
Colonial Latinx studies
Postcolonial and decolonial Caribbean studies and Latin American studies 8
Inter- and transdisciplinary turns in colonial studies
Contributions in this volume
Notes
Works cited
Part I: Colonialism and coloniality
Chapter 1: Race and domination in colonial Latin American studies
Periodization
Domination
Mestizaje
From race to racialization
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
Chapter 2: Self-representation and self-governance in early Latin America
Ethnohistory
Indigenous self-governance
Intermediaries
Indigenous intellectuals
Black intellectuals
Conclusion: toward a new politics of the Afro-indigenous colonial world
Works cited
Chapter 3: Mestizaje as a dispositif for a paradigm shift in colonial studies
The mestizaje strategy and its effects
Mapping mestizaje as an object of study
Concluding remarks and critical considerations on mestizaje as an object of study
Notes
Works cited
Chapter 4: Race, ethnicity and nationhood in the formation of criollismo in Spanish America
Defining the Criollo
The problem of the “nation”
The case of Lima
Independence and the prevalence of criollo identity
Notes
Works cited
Chapter 5: An integrational approach to colonial semiosis
Introduction
Mesoamerican iconography
Andean Quipu
A media-studies approach to the orality-literacy binary
Rational and aesthetic modes of communication
Aesthesis and rationality in indigenous American sign systems
Conclusion
Works cited
Chapter 6: Latin American and Caribbean colonial studies and/in the decolonial turn
Aníbal Quijano
Sylvia Wynter
Notes
Works cited
Chapter 7: The ecocritical turn and the study of early colonial societies in the Caribbean: Of dogs, rivers, and the environmental humanities
Introduction
Ecoreading the colonial classics: of Raleigh, biodiversity and river landscapes
The mute dogs of the conquered
On ecotones and the death of rivers
Conclusion
Works cited
Chapter 8: Coloniality and cinema
The cinematic gaze
Coloniality
Indianizing film
The national critique of cinematic colonialism
Coloniality in films
De/colonizing the labor of film
Knowledge and subjectivity: the colonization of the imaginary
Knowledge and subjectivity: the indianization of the conquistadors
Notes
Works cited
Part II: Knowledge production and networks
Chapter 9: Old Testament, New World: Diluvialism and the Amerindian origins debate in the Enlightenment
Introduction
Theory of the earth
Critique of theories of Amerindian origins
Llano Zapata’s theory of Amerindian origins
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
Chapter 10: The “cannibal cogito” and Brazilian antropofagia Radical heterogeneity or “family resemblance”?
Counter-discourse or “misplaced idea”?
Antropofagia and the “cannibal cogito”
Anthropophagy and perspectivism
The “women’s portion”: gender and sexual cannibalism
Notes
Works cited
Chapter 11: Presumptions of empire: Relapses, reboots, and reversions in the transpacific networks of Iberian globalization
Terra Australis, 1609: in lieu of an Ocean
Manila-Macao-Mexico, 1565: in lieu of a network
Hagåtña/Agaña, 1695: in lieu of Christianity
Alta California, 1794: in lieu of a (vanishing) colonial subject
Notes
Works cited
Chapter 12: Imperial tensions, colonial contours: Jesuits, slavery, and race within and beyond the Portuguese Atlantic
Stray cases
Departures
The case for Vieira
Bodies, souls, empires
Toward an imperial history of slavery and race in Brazil
Note
Works cited
Chapter 13: The Caribbean conundrum: José Antonio Saco’s Hispanic archive and the Black Atlantic
José Antonio Saco and his times
Entering the archive
Recovering Bartolomé de las Casas
Theorizations in the Spanish Caribbean
The Hispanic archive and the Black Atlantic
Works cited
Part III: Materialities and archives
Chapter 14: Material encounters: Columbus’s Diario del primer viaje and the objects of colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies
Material culture, materiality, and colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies: an overview
The materiality of Columbus’s first Atlantic crossing
Rescates and the material culture of the first contact
Colonial object ontologies
Notes
Works cited
Chapter 15: It comes with the territory: Indigenous materialities and Western knowledge
Indigenous material cultures
Monumentality, architecture, and the organization and exploitation of the land
Objects
The materiality of the indigenous past (and present) in Uruguay
Notes
Works cited
Chapter 16: Creole knowledge in colonial Mexico: Religion, gender and power
Scholarship trends on Creole religion, knowledge and gender
Balbuena: knowledge production and religion in Grandeza mexicana
Andrés Pérez de Ribas and Juan Antonio de Oviedo: Creole Jesuit masculinity and spiritual exemplarity
Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora: religious hierarchies of race and gender
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: gendering Creole knowledge
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
Chapter 17: The colonial Latin American archive: Dispossession, ruins, reinvention
Archival dispossession
Archival ruins
Archival reinvention
Conclusion: archival reading, archival writing
Notes
Works cited
Chapter 18: Materialities and archives
Colonial materialities and the history of art
Styles and nomenclature in colonial art and architecture
The material turn and enconchados : a case study
Concluding thoughts: colonial archives
Notes
Works cited
Chapter 19: Port cities as sites of spatial knowledge in eighteenth-century Spanish America
The spatial nature of ports
Re-envisioning ports: containing chaos, disorder, and freedom
Managing the southernmost ports and the racialization of space
Final remarks
Notes
Works cited
Chapter 20: Spatiality and discourse in the region of La Plata
Mud and hunger
With their people as with their women
The Guaraní, encomienda and reduction
The Treaty of Madrid (1750) and the case of the Guaraní wars: toward a policy of mobility
Conclusions
Notes
Works cited
Part IV: Language, translation and beyond
Chapter 21: The white legend: El Dorado, pachacuti, and Walter Raleigh’s discovery of (Latin) America
The Black and the Gold Legend
The Black and the White Legend
Walter Raleigh and pachacuti
Notes
Works cited
Chapter 22: The agency of translation in colonial Latin America: Rethinking the roles of non-European linguistic intermediaries
Reflections on method
Archives
Notes
Works cited
Chapter 23: Intercultural (mis)translations: Colonial static and “authorship” in the Florentine Codex and the relaciones geográficas of New Spain
Pluricultural and plurilingual New Spain
Bilingual/bicultural intermediaries
(Mis)translations: double mistaken identity, colonial static, and untranslatability
The Florentine Codex (General History of the Things of New Spain) 1550s–1570s
The 1577 relaciones geográficas surveys
Conclusions
Notes
Works cited
Chapter 24: Defending the indefensible: Las Casas and the exceptions to sovereignty
Defense: spatial, temporal and ethical axes
Defense as the best offense
Local cosmovisions
Defending and defining origins
Defending the indefensible
Conclusions
Notes
Works cited
Chapter 25: The (dis)continuities of decolonized gender and sexual identity in the Andes
Queer tropes of gender and sexuality
Third-gender performativity, the Andean feminine and primordial androgyny
Contemporary decolonial aesthetics: Travestis and the Chuquichinchay in visual and performance art
Notes
Works cited
Index

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE HISPANIC STUDIES COMPANION TO COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN (1492–1898)

The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492–1898) brings together an international team of scholars to explore new interdisciplinary and comparative approaches for the study of colonialism. Using four overarching themes, the volume examines a wide array of critical issues, key texts, and figures that demonstrate the significance of colonial Latin America and the Caribbean across national and regional traditions and historical periods. This invaluable resource will be of interest to students and scholars of Spanish and Latin American studies examining colonial Latin America and the Caribbean at the intersection of cultural and historical studies; transatlantic, postcolonial and decolonial studies; and critical approaches to archives and materiality. This timely volume assesses the impact and legacy of colonialism and coloniality. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel is Professor and Marta S. Weeks Chair in Latin American Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the University of Miami. Santa Arias is Professor of Latin American Literatures and Cultures in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Kansas.

ROUTLEDGE COMPANIONS TO HISPANIC AND LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES

Routledge Companions to Hispanic and Latin American Studies are state-of-the-art surveys of the key areas within Hispanic and Latin American Studies, providing accessible yet thorough assessments of key problems, themes, and recent developments in research. Series Editor: Brad Epps, University of Cambridge

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO THE HISPANIC ENLIGHTENMENT Edited by Elizabeth Franklin Lewis, Mónica Bolufer Peruga, and Catherine M. Jaffe THE ROUTLEDGE HISPANIC STUDIES COMPANION TO NINETEENTHCENTURY SPAIN Edited by Elisa Martí-López THE ROUTLEDGE HISPANIC STUDIES COMPANION TO COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN (1492–1898) Edited by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias For more information about this series please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Companions-to-Hispanic-and-Latin-AmericanStudies/book-series/RCHLAS

THE ROUTLEDGE HISPANIC STUDIES COMPANION TO COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN (1492–1898)

Edited by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias

SERIES EDITOR: BRAD EPPS SPANISH LIST ADVISOR: JAVIER MUÑOZ-BASOLS

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter,Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library cataloguing-in-publication data A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress cataloging-in-publication data Names: Martínez-San Miguel,Yolanda, editor. | Arias, Santa, editor. Title: The Routledge Hispanic Studies Companion to Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean (1492-1898) / edited by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias. Description: London; New York, NY: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2021. | Series: Routledge companions to Hispanic and Latin American studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020022714 (print) | LCCN 2020022715 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138092952 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315107189 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Colonies--America. | Latin America--History--To 1830. | Latin America--History--1830-1898. | Caribbean Area--History--To 1810. | Caribbean Area--History--1810-1945. Classification: LCC F1410 .R68 2021 (print) | LCC F1410 (ebook) | DDC 980/.01--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022714 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020022715 ISBN: 978-1-138-09295-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-10718-9 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by SPi Global, India

Malena Rodríguez Castro, Emilie L. Bergmann, Georgina Sabat-Rivers, Rosa M. Cabrera, and Margarita Zamora—mentors, “makers” and friends—the collaborative spirit animating this volume is a tribute to their “enseñanzas.”

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments x Contributors xiii Between colonialism and coloniality: Colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies today Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias PART I

1

Colonialism and coloniality

41

  1 Race and domination in colonial Latin American studies Daniel Nemser

43

  2 Self-representation and self-governance in early Latin America Karen Graubart

57

 3 Mestizaje as a dispositif for a paradigm shift in colonial studies Laura Catelli

71

  4 Race, ethnicity and nationhood in the formation of criollismo in Spanish America José Antonio Mazzotti   5 An integrational approach to colonial semiosis Galen Brokaw   6 Latin American and Caribbean colonial studies and/in the decolonial turn Nelson Maldonado-Torres vii

85 99 117

Contents

  7 The ecocritical turn and the study of early colonial societies in the Caribbean: of dogs, rivers, and the environmental humanities Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert   8 Coloniality and cinema Juan Poblete

132 147

PART II

Knowledge production and networks

163

  9 Old Testament, New World: diluvialism and the Amerindian origins debate in the Enlightenment Ruth Hill

165

10 The “cannibal cogito” and Brazilian antropofagia: radical heterogeneity or “family resemblance”? Luís Madureira

183

11 Presumptions of empire: relapses, reboots, and reversions in the transpacific networks of Iberian globalization John D. Blanco

199

12 Imperial tensions, colonial contours: Jesuits, slavery, and race within and beyond the Portuguese Atlantic Hugh Cagle

215

13 The Caribbean conundrum: José Antonio Saco’s Hispanic archive and the Black Atlantic Eyda Merediz

231

PART III

Materialities and archives

247

14 Material encounters: Columbus’s Diario del primer viaje and the objects of colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies Raquel Albarrán

249

15 It comes with the territory: indigenous materialities and Western knowledge Gustavo Verdesio

267

viii

Contents

16 Creole knowledge in colonial Mexico: religion, gender and power Stephanie Kirk

281

17 The colonial Latin American archive: dispossession, ruins, reinvention Anna More

295

18 Materialities and archives Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez

309

19 Port cities as sites of spatial knowledge in eighteenth-century Spanish America Mariselle Meléndez 20 Spatiality and discourse in the region of La Plata Loreley El Jaber

PART IV

328 344

Language, translation and beyond

361

21 The white legend: El Dorado, pachacuti, and Walter Raleigh’s discovery of (Latin) America Ralph Bauer

363

22 The agency of translation in colonial Latin America: rethinking the roles of non-European linguistic intermediaries Larissa Brewer-García

379

23 Intercultural (mis)translations: colonial static and “authorship” in the Florentine Codex and the relaciones geográficas of New Spain Kelly McDonough

393

24 Defending the indefensible: Las Casas and the exceptions to sovereignty Nicole Legnani

406

25 The (dis)continuities of decolonized gender and sexual identity in the Andes Michael Horswell

419

Index

433

ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to start by thanking Javier Muñoz-Basols and Brad Epps for inviting us to curate this volume as part of the series of Routledge Companions to Hispanic and Latin American Studies.The contributors have shown extraordinary enthusiasm and patience during the process and we would like to thank them all. Sam Vale Noya and Rosie McEwan worked with us as our editors at different moments in this project. This volume was supposed to be finished in 2018, but life had other (wonderful and painful) plans for both of us, and the compilation of this companion was delayed several times. We want to thank everyone for sticking with us until the completion of this project. Brad Epps offered particularly encouraging words that allowed both of us to come back to this project with new enthusiasm and energy. We also owe special thanks to Lilianne Lugo-Herrera (University of Miami) who assisted us with research that informed the introduction to this volume. Anna K. Donko (University of Chicago), Luis Sánchez Arrocha (University of Kansas), and Rafael Burgos-Mirabal (University of Massachusetts-Amherst) offered us crucial editorial assistance. Finally, Lisa Rivero provided invaluable assistance with the indexing. We would like to acknowledge their important contributions without which this volume would not have been possible. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel is grateful to Santa Arias, her coeditor, for accepting her invitation to join this project and for the many years of collaboration and discussion about colonial Latin American studies that have informed the introduction, the thematic sections, and the list of contributors that have been brought together in this volume. I also want to thank my students and colleagues at Rutgers–New Brunswick and the University of Miami for contributing to this long process of thinking about colonialism, postcoloniality and coloniality. Nelson Maldonado Torres, Carlos Decena, Camilla Stevens, Anjali Nerlekar, Michelle Stephens, Patricia Saunders, Lillian Manzor,Viviana Díaz Balsera and George Yúdice heard different versions of my musings on transatlantic, early modern and colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies and have shared with me many moments of intellectual and personal joy. The research fellows participating at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, as well as Lorgia García Peña, Adrián Emmanuel Hernández-Acosta, Adri Rodríguez-Ríos, Edwin Ortiz and Katerina González Seligmann (Emerson College) were all important interlocutors that allowed me to rethink colonialism and coloniality more expansively during my research semester at Harvard University. Rígel Lugo and colleagues in 80 grados read and published

x

Acknowledgments

several of my essays on Caribbean and Latin American colonialism and the feedback provided for those columns encouraged me to refine my thinking about the status of the field. I would also like to thank my family and friends for supporting my work and keeping me (in)sane(ly) alive: María Mercedes (Mereche) Martínez-San Miguel,Alexandra (Leisa) Rodríguez Martínez, Luis Andrés Prieto Martínez, Eugenio Frías-Pardo, Jossianna Arroyo, Frances NegrónMuntaner, Maggie de la Cuesta, Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, Mark Trautman, Celinés VillalbaRosado, José Quiroga, Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé, Marisa Belausteguigoitia, Luis Álvarez Icaza, Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia, Ivette Rodríguez and Lourdes Martínez-Echazábal. My mother, Carmen Yolanda (Yolinda) San Miguel, passed away on October 18, 2019, and was unable to read and comment on this project with me. I will miss your notes at the margins of my chapters, but I hope this volume recognizes in some way how much I learned from you. Finally, nothing in my professional and academic career would have been possible without the initial support I received from the Ford Foundation when I was a graduate student and a junior scholar. Santa Arias is indebted to many colleagues and friends. First, I thank Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel for inviting me to be a part of this project.Yolanda is an example of courage and dedication that, coupled with her immense intelligence, make for one of the best scholars and mentors I have encountered. Among other colleagues, I am particularly indebted to Mariselle Meléndez, Rocío Cortés, Eyda Merediz, José Rabasa, Luis Fernando Restrepo, Rocío Quispe-Agnoli, Kathleen Myers, Stephanie Kirk, Amber Bryant, Karen Stolley, Gustavo Verdesio, Mónica Díaz, Vanina M. Teglia, and Ruth Hill. I profoundly admire their contributions to the field and I am grateful for their friendship and support. At the University of Kansas, I have the fortune of co-directing the Hall Center for the Humanities’ Colonialism seminar with Robert Schwaller and Cécile Accilien. The seminar has provided a valuable space in which to maintain an interdisciplinary dialogue on global colonialism and coloniality. I would like to acknowledge Betsaida Reyes, the University of Kansas librarian for my field. Her work and interest in colonial Latin America and the Caribbean have been invaluable in my teaching and research. I am grateful to colleagues with whom I had the pleasure of sharing many conversations and frustrations about past and present forms of colonialism and imperiality. Thank you Magalí Rabasa, Omaris Zamora, Araceli Masterson-Algar, Iris Hauser, and Ignacio Carvajal-Regidor for your engagement with critical issues in research and teaching and continuous effort for a better world. Finally, I am grateful to mi querida familia and, as always, to Gregory T. Cushman for his patience, laughter, kindness, and our life together. This volume is dedicated to our mentors: From Yolanda Malena Rodríguez-Castro taught me to think about colonialism and coloniality in the context of Puerto Rico and world literature when I was an undergraduate student at the University of Puerto Rico. She also gave me permission to ask questions and write, and to find my own place to do the work I love in the classroom, in writing, and in conferences. Emilie L. Bergmann taught me how to read seventeenth-century poetry, shared my love for Sor Juana and rocked her Góngora pants while teaching me to read “Las Soledades.” Georgina Sabat-Rivers taught me to read colonial poetry with passion and care. These three women taught me, took care of me and shared with me how fascinating and complex it has been for them to be women in academia. From Santa I am deeply indebted to Rosa M. Cabrera. During and after my years as an undergraduate at SUNY New Paltz, she served as a model of teaching, mentoring, and generosity. She introduced xi

Acknowledgments

me to colonial and nineteenth-century Latin American and Caribbean literatures and taught me to read and think critically about these texts. During my final year, Rosa Cabrera had a strong opinion about my future and encouraged me to continue with graduate studies.At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Margarita Zamora offered unwavering support, guidance, and encouragement. She underscored the importance of learning across disciplines, of historicizing, and theorizing. Rethinking textuality beyond the confines of the book was a vital lesson from her. Gracias This anthology would have not been possible without the generous support of several institutions. Rutgers University, the University of Miami, and the University of Kansas provided time and funds that were crucial for the completion of this volume. The Wilbur Marvin Visiting Scholarship from the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University and the University of Miami’s Marta S. Weeks Chair in Latin American Studies supported research time for Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel between 2017 and 2020.The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Kansas provided Santa Arias research time during 2020.

xii

CONTRIBUTORS

Raquel Albarrán earned her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and is assistant professor of Luso-Hispanic studies at Middlebury College. She teaches and writes about colonial Latin American and Hispanic Caribbean literatures and cultures. Her first academic monograph is entitled Colonial Assemblages: Race, Materiality, and the Invention of the New World, which focuses attention on the colonial life of objects and the ways in which histories of race are closely intertwined with the circulation of material culture. Mari-Tere Álvarez Ph.D. is a project specialist at the J. Paul Getty Museum and associate director of USC’s International Museum Institute. She has recently coedited Remix:Changing Conversations in Museums of the Americas (University of California Press) as well as Beyond the Turnstile: Making the Case for Museums and Sustainable Values and Arts, Crafts, and Materials in the Age of Global Encounter, 1492–1800, a special edition of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Santa Arias is professor of Latin American literatures and cultures at the University of Kansas. Her research focuses on Spanish colonialism and the critical importance of space and place in articulations of cultural difference, colonialism, and imperiality. She has published Bartolomé de las Casas y la tradición intelectual renacentista (2002) and four coedited volumes: Mapping Colonial Spanish America (2002), Approaches to Teaching the Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas (2008), The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2008), and Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World (2013). She is working on a new book project with the title Entanglements from San Juan:The Imperial-Colonial Paradox of Enlightened Discourses on Improvement at the Caribbean Frontier. Ralph Bauer is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Maryland, College Park. His publications include The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire,Travel, Modernity (Cambridge UP 2003, 2008); The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the NewWorld (University of Virginia Press, 2019); and the coedited collection Translating Nature: Cross-cultural Histories of Early Modern Science (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). John D. (Jody) Blanco teaches the literatures and cultures of early modern globalization under the Spanish Empire (Philippine, Latin American, and Asian), comparative empire studies (Spanish, British, and US) and modern Philippine, Latin American, and Asian-American literatures at the xiii

Contributors

University of California, San Diego. His current research and book manuscript analyze the phantasmagoria and rhetoric of the Spiritual Conquest against the background of social anomie and frontierization in the Philippines between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. He is the author of Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines (UC Press, 2009). Larissa Brewer-García is assistant professor of Latin American literature at the University of Chicago where she specializes in colonial Latin American studies, with a focus on cultural productions of the Caribbean and Andes and the African diaspora. Her publications include Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and articles in journals such as the William and Mary Quarterly and Colonial Latin American Review. Galen Brokaw is professor of Latin American and Latino studies, and Hispanic studies at Montana State University. He is the author of A History of the Khipu (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and coeditor with Jongsoo Lee of Texcoco: Prehispanic and Colonial Perspectives (University Press of Colorado, 2014) and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl and His Legacy (University of Arizona Press, 2016). Hugh Cagle is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Utah, where he is also Director of International Studies. He specializes in the history of science, ­technology, and colonialism in the early modern world, with a particular emphasis on Portugal and its colonies. His first book, Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450–1700 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), won the 2019 Leo Gershoy Award from the American Historical Association. Laura Catelli earned her PhD in Hispanic colonial studies at the University of Pennsylvania and is tenured researcher and director of the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios en Teoría Poscolonial at the Instituto de Estudios Críticos en Humanidades (Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas). She is full professor of Problematics of Twentieth-Century Latin American Art. Her research and teaching focus on the formation of Latin American racial imaginaries, from a transdisciplinary postcolonial and decolonial perspective. She has published articles and book chapters in Latin America and the United States, and her book Arqueología del mestizaje: colonialismo y racialización is forthcoming (Ediciones UFRO, Chile). Loreley El Jaber is professor of Argentine literature at the University of Buenos Aires. She is a researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET). She obtained her PhD in 2008 at the University of Buenos Aires. Professor El Jaber specializes in colonial Río de la Plata discourse and colonial Latin American studies as well as nineteenthcentury Argentine literature. Her publications include Un país malsano. La conquista del espacio en las crónicas del Río de la Plata (2011), the coedited volume Fronteras escritas. Cruces, desvíos y pasajes en la literatura argentina (2008), the first volume “Una patria literaria” of the Historia crítica de la literatura argentina (2014, coordinated with Cristina Iglesia), and the critical edition of the chronicle of Ulrich Schmidl, Derrotero y viaje a España y las Indias (2016). Karen Graubart is associate professor of history and concurrent associate professor of Romance languages and literatures at the University of Notre Dame. Her first book, With Our Labor and xiv

Contributors

Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru (2007) won the Ligia Parra Jahn prize of the Rocky Mountain Council of Latin American Studies. She has published numerous articles on colonial history, gender, and race, and is presently completing a new book, Republics of Difference: Religious and Racial Self-Governance in Castile and Peru, 1248–1650 (under contract at Oxford University Press). Her work has been supported by Fulbright, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, and other generous agencies. Ruth Hill is professor of Spanish and Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. She is the author of two books and several articles. Currently, she is working on two book projects: a history of Aryanism in the Americas from the nineteenth century to the present entitled Incas, Aztecs, and Other White Men: A Hemispheric History of Hate, and a comparative analysis of colonial racial histories entitled Reckoning with Race in the Americas (under contract, University of Virginia Press). Michael Horswell is professor of Spanish and Latin American literature and Dean of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University. He is the author of Decolonizing the Sodomite: Queer Tropes of Sexuality in Colonial Andean Culture (2005), the coedited volumes Submerged: Alternative Cuban Cinema with Luis Duno-Gottberg (2013); Baroque Projections: Images and Texts in Dialogue with the Early Modern Hispanic World with Frédéric Conrod (2016); and Sexualidades Periféricas. Consolidaciones literarias y fílmicas en la España de fin de siglo XIX y fin de milenio with Nuria Godón (2016). Stephanie Kirk is professor of Spanish and affiliate professor of religious studies and women, gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of two books: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico (Routledge, 2016) and Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities (Florida University Press, 2018 and 2007). Other publications include her coedited volume Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014). She is currently working on a book project entitled Global Martyrs: Jesuit Missionaries in Early Modern England, Ireland, and the Hispanic World as well as a translation into English of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s convent chronicle Paraíso occidental. Nicole Legnani earned her PhD from Harvard University and is an assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. Her work focuses on the intersection between venture capital, the laws of peoples and theology in the conquest of America. Her monograph The Business of Conquest: Empire, Love and Law in the Atlantic World is forthcoming with the University of Notre Dame Press. Her second book project, tentatively titled The Dispossessed: Insurgent Voices in 1560s Peru engages deeply with a decade of developments in colonial Peru, while conversing more widely with heresy, postcolonial, and subaltern studies as well as ethnohistory and Indigenous studies. She is also the translator and editor of Titu Cusi: A 16th-century Account of the Conquest (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). Her articles have appeared in Hispanic American Historical Review, Romance Notes, and in Bulletin of Hispanic Studies. Luís Madureira is professor of African cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He earned his PhD in comparative literature from the University of California-San Diego. His research interests include Luso-Brazilian colonial and postcolonial studies, modernism and modernity in Latin America, Africa and the Caribbean, early modern and colonial studies, and xv

Contributors

theater and performance in Africa. He has published two books and several articles on these and related topics. His current projects center on Mozambican drama and Luso-African historical fiction. Nelson Maldonado-Torres is professor of Latino and Caribbean studies, and of comparative literature, as well as director of the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is also a former president of the Caribbean Philosophical Association (2008–2013), and member of the executive board of the Frantz Fanon Foundation. His publications include Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Duke University Press, 2008), and the collection of essays entitled La descolonización y el giro descolonial [Decolonization and the decolonial turn], compiled by the Universidad de la Tierra (Chiapas, Mexico) in 2011. He has written dozens of journal articles and book chapters on decolonial thought, political theory, and the theory of religion, among other areas. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel is the Marta S. Weeks Chair in Latin American Studies at the University of Miami. She specializes in colonial and postcolonial Latin American and Caribbean literatures. She is the author of four books: Saberes americanos: Subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana (1999); Caribe Two-Ways? Cultura de la migración en el Caribe insular hispánico (2003); From Lack to Excess: “Minor” Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse (2008); and Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context (2014). She has recently coedited three anthologies: Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought (2016, with Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui and Marisa Belausteguigoitia), Trans Studies:The Challenge to Hetero/Homo Normativities (2016, with Sarah Tobias), and Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations (2020, with Michelle Stephens). José Antonio Mazzotti is King Felipe VI of Spain professor of Spanish culture and civilization and professor of Latin American literature at Tufts University. He has published numerous essays on El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, creole cultures, viceregal epic poetry, contemporary poetry and the documentation of Amazonian languages. His collection El Zorro y la Luna (poemas reunidos 1981–2016) received the José Lezama Lima International Poetry Prize from Casa de las Américas, Cuba, in 2018. Kelly McDonough (Anishinaabe [White Earth] and Irish descent) is an associate professor of Latin American literary & cultural studies and Indigenous studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. S​ he is the author of The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico (2014), and various articles related to Nahua studies. Her current book in progress is entitled Indigenous Science and Technologies of Mexico Past and Present: Nahuas and the World Around Them. McDonough is coeditor of the Native American and Indigenous Studies journal. Mariselle Meléndez is professor and head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author of Deviant and Useful Citizens: The Cultural Production of the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Peru (2011), Raza, género e hibridez en El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes (1999), and coeditor of Mapping Colonial Spanish America: Places and Commonplaces of Identity, Culture, and Experience (2002). Her articles have appeared in journals such as Latin American Research Review, Colonial Latin American Review, and Revista Iberoamericana, among others. Her current book in progress focuses on the cultural and racial geography of Spanish American ports in the eighteenth century and is under contract with Vanderbilt UP. xvi

Contributors

Eyda Merediz is associate professor and head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland, College Park. A graduate of Princeton University, her academic interests concentrate on the fields of colonial Latin American studies and early modern transatlantic literatures and cultures. She is the author of Refracted Images: The Canary Islands through a New World Lens (MRTS 2004). She has also edited, with Santa Arias, the volume Approaches to Teaching the Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas (MLA 2008), and with Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Otros estudios transatlánticos: lecturas desde lo latinoamericano (IILI, 2009). More recently, she has undertaken a project centered on critical appropriations of Bartolomé de las Casas in the Caribbean. Anna More is professor in the Department of Literary Theory and Literatures at the Universidade de Brasília. She is the author of Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); editor of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: Selected Works, a Norton Critical Edition (2016); and coeditor of Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization (2019). Her current work focuses on the relationship between death and value in the Iberian slave trade, from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Daniel Nemser is an associate professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2017), which won the Latin American Studies Association’s Mexico Humanities Book Award in 2018. Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert is a professor of Caribbean culture and literature in the Department of Hispanic Studies and The Environmental Studies Program at Vassar College, where she holds the Sarah Tod Fitz Randolph Distinguished Professor Chair. Professor ParavisiniGebert is the author of a number of books, among them Phyllis Shand Allfrey: A Caribbean Life (1996), Jamaica Kincaid: A Critical Companion (1999), Creole Religions of the Caribbean (with Margarite Fernández Olmos, 2003; 2nd ed., 2011), Literatures of the Caribbean (2008) and the forthcoming Extinctions:The Ecological Cost of Colonization in the Caribbean (Liverpool University Press). She coedits Repeating Islands, a blog on Caribbean culture, with Ivette Romero-Cesareo. Juan Poblete, professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Author of La escritura de Pedro Lemebel como proyecto cultural y político (2019); Hacia una historia de la lectura y la pedagogía literaria en América Latina (2019); and Literatura chilena del siglo XIX: entre públicos lectores y figuras autoriales (2003), all in Cuarto Propio; editor of Critical Latin American and Latino Studies (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power (Routledge, 2017); and coeditor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Non-citizenship (Rutgers University Press, 2021), Piracy and Intellectual Property in Latin America: Rethinking Creativity and the Common Good (Routledge, 2020), Sports and Nationalism in Latin America (Palgrave, 2015), Humor in Latin American Cinema (Palgrave, 2015), Desdén al infortunio: Sujeto, comunicación y público en la narrativa de Pedro Lemebel (Cuarto Propio, 2010), Andrés Bello (IILI, 2009), and Redrawing The Nation: National Identities in Latin/o American Comics (Palgrave, 2009). Gustavo Verdesio is associate professor of Spanish and Native American studies at the University of Michigan. A revised English version of his book La invención del Uruguay. La entrada del territorio y sus habitantes a la cultura occidental (1996) has been published as Forgotten Conquests. Rereading New World History from the Margins (Temple University Press, 2001). He coedited (with Álvaro F. Bolaños) the collection Colonialism Past and Present. Reading and Writing about Colonial Latin America Today (State Universtiy of New York Press, 2002). He has also edited an issue of the journal Dispositio/n (#52, 2005) dedicated to the legacy of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. xvii

Contributors

Charlene Villaseñor Black is professor of art history and Chicana/o studies at the University of California, Los Angeles; the author of Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire; editor of Tradition and Transformation: Chicana/o Art from the 1970s to the 1990s, and editor of Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies. In 2016–2017 she was awarded UCLA’s Gold Shield Faculty Prize for Academic Excellence. She is founding editor-in-chief of Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture (University of California Press).

xviii

BETWEEN COLONIALISM AND COLONIALITY Colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies today Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias

Introduction Since we both share a passion for maps, we tried to find a cartographic representation for the cover that was both Americas-centric and Global South-centric. Although many images came to mind, we were not expecting the process of finding a map that would address the complexity of the representation of colonial spaces to be so difficult.The image that we chose is not perfect, because it is still a map conceived from a European point of view. Cartography, as J. B. Harley (2001) has theorized so well, is not a mode of representation but of invention that has been dominated by imperial, First World-centric perspectives. As a result, Americas-centric maps, that show its strategic position between the Atlantic and the Pacific, Europe, Africa and Asia, and that at the same time showcase a Global South perspective are not that easy to find.We are therefore reframing the interpretation of this map in a way that invites our readers to focus on the alternative worldviews that become possible when colonial studies is intentional about making this happen. We chose the “Map of America” by German cartographer and humanist, Sebastian Münster. This map was originally published in 1538, and was reprinted several times until it was included in his Cosmographia Universalis (1544), Münster’s best-known geographical and historical text that was published in five languages and forty-six editions (Harley 1990). Mixing medieval and modern geographical ideas and findings, this map includes several firsts: it is the first printed map focused only on the Western Hemisphere, and it is the first map to name the Pacific Ocean and the Strait of Magellan. It includes one of the earliest representations of Japan (identified as Zipangri), and it is also one of the first cartographic representations of John Cabot’s and Giovanni da Verrazano’s travels in North America in the 1490s and 1520s respectively. In addition, there is a reference to the Treaty of  Tordesillas and its division of Spanish and Portuguese possessions in the Americas and the map clearly represents the Americas as a separate insular landmass barely forty-six years after the so-called “discovery” of the Americas.1 The Caribbean is represented in detail, with the Castilian flag waving over Saona (­confused with what is today known as Puerto Rico).2 North, Central and South America appear at the center, while Asia, Europe and Africa are represented on both sides of the map, close to the borders of the image. The vessel in the Pacific commemorates the Magellan-Elcano circumnavigation of 1519–1522. There are references to European myths and stereotypes, like the

1

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias

representation of Brazil as a land of cannibals, or the Southern Cone as a region inhabited by giants. Cuba, Hispaniola, Florida,Yucatan, and Tenochtitlan are clearly identified.Yet beyond all of the accurate and inaccurate portrayals that one can find on this map, it is the centrality of the Americas, and its contacts with Asia, Europe and Africa through the navigational networks of the Manila Galleons and the expeditions by Magellan and Marco Polo, that prompted us to use this cartographic visual text. We believe that our decolonial misreading of Münster’s map can be representative of the complex networks of imperialism and coloniality that are simultaneously transatlantic and transpacific. In this map the Americas are a center of the European colonial enterprise that becomes a location more closely connected to the Global South via its coloniality, than to the Global North via the imperial potentiality of its rich resources. The study of colonialism and coloniality has a long lineage across disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Yet, it has changed dramatically within the last thirty years under the influence of theoretical positionings, disciplinary and interdisciplinary turns. In Latin American literary and cultural studies, while scholarship on “the colonial” has traditionally focused on cultural manifestations under Iberian rule, critical engagements with postcolonialism and decoloniality have expanded the temporal, geographical, and epistemological domains of the field. Instead, these two frameworks refocus on the critical examination of historically and ideologically determined formations of knowledge, practices of domination, and forms of resistance from a colonial standpoint. These shifts in scholarship are viewed as necessary lessons on the pervasive legacy of early modern imperial designs. The essays in this volume propose innovative examinations of cultural conceptualizations of colonialism and coloniality to interrogate power relations and imperial practices of economic development, population and territorial expansion, and the production of knowledge. The four overarching themes used to organize this collection of essays—colonialism and coloniality, knowledge and networks, materialities and archives, and language, translation and beyond—offer entry points to examine questions about the circulation of ideas, objects and people, race and mestizaje, gender and sexuality, geography and geographical thinking, the transformation of nature, geopolitics, sovereignty, and imperial power.We hope that the topics proposed to organize the essays in this volume offer new insights about central epistemological premises for understanding the colonial world. Approaches to colonialism and its inscriptions call for a profound reflection about the nature of colonialism, as a process of territorialization of new spatial formations that transformed natural landscapes and environments. The centrality of the study of Latin American colonialism today is indebted to its interdisciplinary and transhistorical nature, attentive to its pervasive local and global reaching consequences for the human and non-human worlds. Scholarship on Latin American and Caribbean colonial studies brings to the fore critical concerns that expose the tensions between the past and the present—it therefore needs to be viewed as another form of political practice with crucial methodological implications. As is the case with other theories and approaches to the study of literature and culture, the examination of texts, institutions, and situated practices that shaped the Latin American and Caribbean colonial experience before 1898 is neatly tied to enduring questions that go beyond the issue of scholarly or academic representation. There is no doubt that colonialism and coloniality are alive and well in Latin America, the Caribbean, and US Latinx enclaves. It is almost impossible not to notice the entanglements of contemporary manifestations with the colonial past. The colonial roots of national movements, as well as neocolonial and neoimperial designs of major significance in the broader field of Latin American studies, have led to interdisciplinary research on ethics, citizenship, migration and human rights violations.These themes and their call for political activism, can be found in some of the most recent reconceptualizations of the field. For instance, for a new generation of 2

Between colonialism and coloniality

scholars, decolonization is not merely an abstract notion in the analysis of the transition from colonies to republics. While the study of the colonial period unveils imperial and colonial engagements, it also questions the Eurocentric rationality, as well as consequences that have hindered aspirations for sovereignty, equality, or even “el buen vivir” (Gudynas 2011). Scholars have offered important (and often critical) overviews of the main modes of configuration of the colonial period in histories, anthologies or compilations of Latin American and Caribbean cultural studies (such as the study of generations, periodizations and particular genres) (Balbuena Briones 1952; Anderson and Florit 1960; Hamilton 1960; Anderson Imbert 1965, 1969; Lazo 1965; Madrigal 1982; Goic 1988; Vidal 1993; Zavala and Rico 1994; Valdés and Kadir 2004; Adorno and Echevarría 2017; Chang Rodríguez and Filer 2017). Some of the canonical histories and edited volumes of colonial Latin American literature (i.e., Goic 1988; Gónzalez-Stephan and Costigan 1992; Greenblatt 1993; Ceballos, Cole and Scott 1994; CastroKlaren 2008; González-Echevarría and Pupo-Walker 2008), prompted by the quincentennial anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage, offer new criticism on colonial texts, take on innovative theoretical or disciplinary turns to examine the colonial experience (i.e., Mignolo 1995; Arias and Meléndez 2002; Moraña 2005; Castro 2008; Rodríguez and Martínez 2011), or make hemispherical connections between the Anglo and Spanish conquests of the Americas (Greenblatt 1993; Castillo and Schweitzer 2001; Bauer 2003b). More recently, some edited volumes have focused on important keywords and/or theoretical turns that can be used to define Latin American cultural studies as a whole and include references to the colonial period in their examinations (i.e., Irwin and Szurmuk 2009; Martínez-San Miguel et al. 2016; Poblete 2018). Historians have also contributed to the cultural field paying attention to key concepts that define the production, exchange and circulation of knowledge (Levy and Mills 2013). It is impossible to propose a critical history that can do justice to the complexity of the field (Castro 2008, 6; González Echevarría and Pupo Walker 2008, 32). Therefore, this volume aims to focus on the entrenched workings of colonialism and coloniality and reflect on novel themes and debates through new approaches and interpretations. In thinking about the field beyond the framework of a single genealogy of colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies, in this introduction we are engaging four tendencies or schools of thought to discuss the formation and transformation of colonial studies since its creation in the nineteenth century until the present: (1) the invention of colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies and its establishment as the origin of latinoamericanism; (2) the process of Latinization of the colonial period; (3) the challenges and contributions of postcolonial and decolonial frameworks in the field; and (4) the inter- and transdisciplinary engagements that have nourished the scholarship in colonial Latin American studies. We do not conceive these four areas of thought or dimensions of the field as chronological developments, but rather as tendencies that have informed Caribbean and Latin American colonial studies transversally.

The invention of the Latin American and Caribbean colonial period We would like to start this section with an apparently uncontroversial affirmation: the colonial period was a colonizing invention and a modern project advanced by cultural agents (bibliophiles, historians, writers and cultural critics) to provide Latin American literary history with a parallel structure to European literary histories. If one thinks of the ideological underpinnings that the gathering and recovery of documents entailed, the colonial period was much conceived as the equivalent to the recovery of the medieval period in European cultural projects with a clear presentist goal of establishing the pre-national origins to national literatures and cultures. 3

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias

The nationalist and romantic teleologies that shaped the study of colonialism in literature, history, and even anthropology proved to be compromised by contemporary debates and political agendas. Moreover, the colonial archive (or archives) shared with the medieval corpus the problem of anachronism, since literary and cultural historians would classify a wide variety of written texts under genres and categories that were alien to their contexts of production. As a consequence, these early archival projects denied a place to cultural objects, the role of institutions, and the subaltern perspectives hidden behind other voices (Arias 2015). Within the field of Latin American literary history and criticism, the emergence of colonial studies as an academic field needs to consider early archival activities and establishments of libraries by indigenous, mestizo, and Creole intellectuals who took the first steps to recover, order, and safeguard primary sources that were later listed in encyclopedic projects that showcased and enlightened with pride (yet following Eurocentric models) the cultural wealth of different regions across the Americas. Initial Eurocentric colonial archives, and the circulation of primary sources via printed collections, such as those edited by Andrés González de Barcia (1749), Martín Fernández de Navarrete (1825–1844) and Lord Kingsborough (1831), also serve as ideal sites for research on the problematic origins of Latin American colonial literature and, more importantly, as examples of the limited repertoire of imperial projects that present more questions than answers (Taylor 2003). Criollos, reasserting an American-centric identity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or seeking autonomous power and local government in the nineteenth century, replaced the European colonizers who with their economic privilege and social positioning gave continuity to Enlightenment liberalism (Ross 1993; Bauer and Mazzotti 2009; More 2013). For nineteenth-century criollo intellectuals, the constitution of early archives and publications that followed sought to give heightened importance to patriotic agendas for the democratization of knowledge, abolition of slavery, and independence. Perhaps some of the best examples of these early criollo archives are from the Atlantic circuit reaching to the earliest US Latinx enclaves (Lazo 2016). José Antonio Saco, Domingo del Monte, Alejandro Tapia y Rivera José Julián Acosta, and Arturo Schomburg published and taught by unveiling a colonial literaryhistorical corpus that exposed Spanish hegemony and its instruments for empire building. The critical and historical apparatus used to conceptualize the colonial Caribbean and Latin American literary and cultural canon was significantly transformed during the eighteenth century. After the Wars of Succession, the Bourbon monarchy set new priorities for recovering Spain’s historical past in the context of the extraimperial competition for global reach. Despite its decline in military power and loss of vast swaths of territories to Portugal, Britain and France during the second half of the century, court ministers and their letrados sought to find and reproduce their nation with the establishment and reordering of archives, libraries and new royal institutions designed for the grand display of imperiality. As Christopher Schmidt-Nowara (2006) notes, historians of the era agreed that Spain had become an imperial power with the expansion of the routes of commerce made possible under Columbus’s lead. Neither Portuguese nor Italian historians could bring forward the evidence needed to recover this historical figure from oblivion.When Juan Bautista Muñoz was asked to write the definitive history of the Indies to refute northern European philosophes, he began a long and arduous process to lay the foundation for a comprehensive account that reinserted Columbus back at the center of Spain’s modern history with newly found documents.3 While the impetus to recover the Columbian experience in order to redefine Spain’s modern history originates within Madrid’s cultural institutions, paradoxically, the actual remaking of Columbus as a global hero of civilization and religion was achieved from abroad. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, other chroniclers and colonial actors were also inscribed in the canon across Europe and the Americas: Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernal Díaz 4

Between colonialism and coloniality

del Castillo, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, José de Acosta, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Alonso de Ercilla, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, to name a few. Thereafter the canon was further enriched by more recent generations of scholars who unveiled new actors, documents, and/or redirected critical attention to questions of race, gender and sexuality, indigenous sources, space, science, and the environment (Mazzotti 2000; Arias and Meléndez 2002; Myers 2003; Bennett 2006, 2009, 2018; Hill 2007; Martínez 2008; Arenal and Schlau 2010; Paravisini-Gebert 2011; Kirk and Rivett 2014; Brian 2016; Bentancor 2017; Quispe Agnoli and Díaz 2017; Bauer 2019; Bigelow 2020). Anyone who has followed the development of colonial studies should be able to recognize the impact of scholarly editions and interdisciplinary scholarship on Guaman Poma de Ayala, Chimalpahin, Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc, the Popol Vuh, the Huarochirí Manuscript, and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, among many others. A more recent tendency is to propose the study of latinidad, Blackness and indigeneity from comparative perspectives that include north-south dialogues in the Americas and south-south comparisons and juxtapositions (­Castro-Klaren 2008; Coronado 2013; Saldaña-Portillo 2016; Hooker 2017; Nemser 2017; Martínez-San Miguel 2018b) or to question the whole narrative of the indigenous disappearance in the Caribbean (Jackson 2012; Newton 2013; Feliciano‐Santos 2017a, 2017b, 2021). Once “invented,” the colonial period presented several challenges for Latin American cultural studies scholars. First, many of the texts that were read as the “origins” of the literary tradition were not actually produced or intended as aesthetic interventions. “Literature” as it was defined and configured in nineteenth-century Europe, did not exist as such in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteen centuries. Furthermore, the notion of literature cannot be assumed to be a universal category that can be imposed on the rich diversity of communities inhabiting the Americas from the sixteenth century to the present (Mignolo 2013). For example, the written accounts that are usually identified as the beginnings of Latin American literatures were chronicles, relaciones, administrative documents, and correspondence between colonial authorities and the metropolis. Others were legal, liturgical and evangelical texts in which the performative and aesthetic dimensions were explicitly secondary. More recently, Fernando Degiovanni (2018), in his discussion on the foundations of Latinoamericanism, has examined Latin American literature as a product that, from its beginnings, has been mediated by the specter of war and proposals on the region’s potential for economic development. The heightened significance of imperiality and development could explain how indigenous and subaltern subjects’ aesthetic, historical and symbolic expressions were systematically excluded from many of the early literary histories about the colonial Americas. Although colonial poetics also had a place in the literary canon as an imperial instrument, poets often embraced military or courtly motifs to promote heroic deeds of military expansion and social order (Beverley 1998; López-Chávez 2016; Téllez 2012). The imperial purview was contested by satire writers that in prose and verse offer an unforgiving critique of metropolitan life in cities such as Mexico, Lima, and Bogota (Johnson 2014). Finally, the notion of history that was prevalent during the colonization, conquest, and second imperial expansion under Bourbon rule in the Americas and Pacific regions included aspects of what we currently associate with the literary function (Beckjord 2007). Therefore, colonial discourses that have been conceptualized as the origins of Latin American literature belong simultaneously in more than one archival corpus, and in several of the currently known literary and discursive genres. Crucial interrogations remain open for discussion and analysis. On the one hand, many of the authors did not intend to produce texts that will eventually be located outside the European historical, literary or cultural archives/canon. In this context, the Latin American dimension of these texts is the result of a completely different exercise of interpretation disengaged from their 5

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias

context of production. As a consequence, many of the Latin American resonances we currently identify in the early colonial corpus are readings against the grain of this archive. On the other hand, even when the Americas are central in the production of these colonial texts, it became evident very early on that the writers’ locus of enunciation and intentions were not the depiction, preservation, or celebration of Latin American and Caribbean cultural traditions. Instead, many of these descriptive and narrative accounts register the painful and difficult colonization of the imaginary (Gruzinski 1988), as well as the agency and creative modes of resistance and accommodation that emerged in the Americas and other colonial regions as an alternative locus of enunciation from which local and native voices were able to transmit their experiences, ways of knowing, and ancient traditions (Charles 2010; Yannakakis, 2014; Matthew and Oudijk 2014; McDonough 2014).This realization of the polysemic and contingent nature of language (verbal and non-verbal) and its inability to capture the explicit intention of an authorial voice or a response to socio-political goals, has been crucial in the continuous rearticulation of the field. It would not be until the late 1960s that cultural historians began to question the periodization that established the beginnings of Latin American “civilization” as a global extension of the Reconquista that was centered in the account of Columbus’s enterprise. Critics and literary historians Raimundo Lazo (1965), Jean Franco (1969, 1975a), Guiseppe Bellini (1985), and Cedomil Goic (1988) problematized the imperiality of Spanish literary histories that included the colonial literary corpus. Goic (1988, 26) identifies the emergence of colonial Spanish American studies as a distinct field in the critical and historiographical work previously conducted by Moses (1922), Pirotto (1937) and Picón Salas (1944).This Latin Americanist approach to the colonial period was later expanded in works by key scholars, such as López Baralt (1988, 1993), Mignolo and Boone (2004), Castro-Klaren (2008), Adorno (2000), Chang-Rodríguez (1988, 1991) and Chang-Rodríguez and Filer (2017), among others. Recent work has continued to recover indigenous and African cultural discourses as an alternative to the Euro- and verbal-centric archive established in the late eighteenth century (Bennett 2006, 2009, 2018; Brewer-García 2012, 2019; Díaz Balsera 2018; Fuentes 2018). The important yet oftentimes ambivalent role of criollismo during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries has been critically examined by scholars of colonial Latin American discourses (Ross 1993; Bauer and Mazzotti 2009; Mazzotti 2016; More 2013; Stolley 2013; and others). Mounting research on the presence of mestizos and criollos in the religious orders and convents has benefited from new perspectives across disciplines that bring attention to their agency in art, science, geography, and their political role shaping the colonial church (Villaseñor Black 2006; Lavrin 2008; Asúa 2014; Díaz 2017). This evolving scholarship on the role of criollos and other subaltern subjects who contributed to colonial literary history and the institutionalization of knowledge had a strong beginning in Pedro Henríquez Ureña’s Harvard lectures later published in his Literary Currents in Hispanic America (1945).4 The field has had a series of crucial moments in the redefinition and reinvention of its object of study during the last forty years.The first one was the interrogation of the notion of colonial discourse (Adorno 1988; Seed 1991; Vidal 1993; Klor de Alva 1995). We will review that moment in our discussion about theorizations of the colonial, postcolonial and decolonial in Latin America. The second one is the problematization of “literature” to interrogate the ­written-centric configuration of the field, to propose the study of “colonial discourse” and “colonial semiosis” as a rather capacious method of analysis that would allow for a decentralization of the modern notions of book and literature from our field of study (Adorno 1988; Mignolo 1989). One of the main results of this critical moment was the inclusion of a broad

6

Between colonialism and coloniality

array of modes of cultural production and the redefinition of “writing” beyond the confines of the alphabet and books as a universal mode of expression (Taylor 2003; Salomon 2004; Boone and Mignolo 2004; Brokaw 2010). Some scholars have also analyzed the many ways in which indigenous, African and non-European communities did engage with writing and used existing religious and legal discursive forms to preserve their cultural traditions (Brokaw 2010; Bennett 2009; León Llerena 2011; McDonough 2014). A third important moment was the call for a decolonization of colonial studies, to interrogate Euro- and verbal-centric notions of history and culture, and to showcase the history of indigenous, Black, mestizo and Asian populations that did not adhere to the white, criollista and nationalist teleologies (Kubayanda 1990; Mignolo 2000, 2009; Rabasa 2000; Blanco 2009; LópezCalvo 2009; Brewer-García 2012; López 2013). Gender, gender expression and sexuality have also generated an important body of scholarship that is linked to the reconfiguration of the field after the emergence of subaltern studies as well as a whole series of interdisciplinary modes of inquiry that we will discuss in more detail in the fifth section of this introduction (Curiel 2013; Gruzinski 2002; Horswell 2006; Lugones 2007, 2008, 2010; Goldmark 2015; Tortorici 2018). From the invention of the colonial to the deconstruction of its imperial/colonial and nationalist premises, the field of colonial Latin American studies has grown to become an important area of inquiry that is producing exciting scholarship. Furthermore, today’s scholars do not conceive colonialism either as the sole origin of Latin American and Caribbean cultures and histories, or as the proto-nationalist preface to contemporary identities in the region. Critics and scholars recognize the existence of symbolic and historical archives produced by populations that existed before colonialism (even though these are often hard to study due to the difficulty involved in accessing and preserving non-written materials), as well as the emergence of identities and cultural expressions that complicate or transcend the confines of the colonial context in which they originated. This expansion of the colonial archive, and/or of the inquiries that are examined through the written, verbal, symbolic, archaeological and otherwise material corpus that is available to historians, cultural critics and interdisciplinary scholars, has also generated important debates about the approaches and methods that can and shall be used to study a more encompassing and complex notion of the early moments for Latin American cultures and societies (Verdesio 2010a, 2010b). Nowadays, the colonial period is hardly an invention of a group of First World and Euro-American scholars wishing to produce parity between European and American cultural histories. The colonial Latin American archive is a vibrant and complex repository of materials that are crucial to understand contemporary cultural and symbolic productions, as well as political and social experiences in the region. This is precisely the second tendency or school of thought that we would like to discuss in the next section.

The Latinx Americanization of colonial studies In this section we include two parallel genealogies that are crucial in the formation of the contemporary inflections of the field: the Latin Americanization and the Latinization of colonial studies. We are linking these two processes because both focus on the centrality of Latinx Americanity and colonialism. We therefore adopt a gender-neutral version of José Quiroga’s capacious conflation of both tendencies in his term “Latino American” (2000). This gesture of including these two important historiographical projections of the field aims to signal the existing collaborations between area and ethnic studies that are constitutive of recent scholarship in colonial Caribbean and Latin American studies.

7

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias

Colonial Latin America Any discussion of the Latin Americanization of colonial studies needs to be approached with much caution.This complicated story of the origins of Latin American colonial studies cannot be separated from the beginnings of Latin American history and literary studies as fields that resulted from the modern ordering of knowledge that shaped institutional learning during the nineteenth century. As Foucault reminds us, knowledge is bound up with a search for the epistemic truth that justifies political power. As we will discuss in what follows, in this process, imperial and national politics shaped cultural values that hinged on subjects’ transnational circuits. Mobility allowed them access to archives and communities that would support their political agendas. While most of the following examples pertain to the Spanish American experience, it is critical to acknowledge that early underpinnings of coloniality and colonial cultural history in the Spanish-speaking regions share significant threads of history with Brazil. Herbert Bolton (1933), Lewis Hanke (1964), Eduardo Galeano (1992), and a vast number of scholars in history and literature grappled with the idea of their common history. Historian Marshall Eakin (2014) returns to the relevant question on the use of “Latin America” to refer to the territorial space mostly colonized by European empires, primarily by Spain and Portugal. The name “Latin America” was first imposed in the mid-nineteenth century by the Spanish American Creoles who sought a collective identity based on their history as former Spanish and Portuguese colonies. As Eakin writes, paradoxically, imperial expansion had much to do with the prevalent use of the name. It took hold when Napoleon III described the broad region he wished to conquer. While the Creole’s collective agency that invented the idea of Latin America had significant implications in the Latin Americanization of colonial studies, it is important to acknowledge the role of the imperiality of naming on these two opposing fronts. Napoleon III’s use of Latin America was brief; it was replaced with Spanish America after a few years. Its debut in publications, histories and literary anthologies inscribed and celebrated the “expansive idea of Hispanism” (Resina 2005) by highlighting the Spanish colonial period, thus excluding any memory of indigenous territories and a shared geography and ethnohistory with Brazil. Sharing or not the spirit of Hispanism, transnational interventions—as well as exchanges between Spain, the United States, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Latin America— marked access and scholarship on the colonial corpus in a long process between the late eighteenth century and the 1980s. At the root of this genealogy are the colonial texts of the Iberian early modern canon. As Richard Kagan reminds us, universities in France and Germany had already established Spanish studies in the late eighteenth century.The emphasis on “Golden Age literature” brought prominence to chronicles, epic poetry, and comedias de Indias (plays on the Indies), which recreated the theater of war of the conquest (Quintana 2010). Hispanists at Göttingen, Paris, and even across the Atlantic, at Harvard, mastered Spain’s literary history and established a Spanish-centered curriculum that included the imperial expansion, which remained in place until the 1960s (Kagan 2002, 2019; Ríos-Font 2005). During the Age of Revolutions (1774–1849), key intellectuals from Latin America and Europe traveled back and forth, creating a circuit of exchanges that made possible the appropriation of ideas that would influence education and enlightened scholarship, economic investments, and political alliances and interventions (Brown and Paquette 2013). For instance, London became a center of revolutionary activity after Francisco de Miranda’s exile. Between 1811 and 1816, Servando Teresa de Mier, Luis López Méndez, Carlos María de Alvear, Simón Bolívar, and Andrés Bello lodged in Miranda’s residence while seeking international support. From London, Bello published in the monthly El Censor Americano (Jaksić 2006, 66), and later began his publications Biblioteca Americana (1823) and Repertorio Americano (1826–27). These periodical 8

Between colonialism and coloniality

publications included his poems, literary criticism, and essays on language, politics, and more. Articles by other intellectuals on natural history, geography, and science—Enlightenment knowledge that could support designs for progress and improvement in the Americas—were published as well. Bello’s Biblioteca and Repertorio provide an opportunity to consider how Creoles’ publications uncovered and brought visibility to unknown primary sources to educate and deploy research agendas. He was formed as a colonial subject, fought against colonialism, translated and made available colonial primary sources, and, more importantly, wrote a grammar for the americanos. His activities and calls to develop an autochthonous American cultural tradition that transcends national boundaries recognized the significance of historical writing and poetics produced under colonialism. Those arguments were further developed by José Martí (1891), José Enrique Rodó (1900), Manuel Ugarte (1920), and Octavio Paz (1959) among many others who advanced ideas of a continental Latin American other. In Bello’s 1842 inaugural lecture as president of the University of Chile, he called for reading and revaluing colonial texts to forge a new future (Jaksić 1999). At that moment, Spain had not yet published its first literary history. The Spanish Romantic dramatist and scholar Antonio Gil y Zárate published his Manual de literatura in 1844, and the seven volumes of the first comprehensive history, José Amador de los Ríos’s Historia crítica de la literatura española, were published between 1861 and 1865. From Gil y Zárate and Amador de los Ríos to still well-known literary histories and anthologies such as Ángel del Río’s Historia de la literatura española (1948), the inclusion of Sor Juana, el Inca Garcilaso, Alonso Ercilla y Zúñiga, and early chroniclers eroded Latin American cultural capital, by enlisting these authors in a canon that served the national and cultural reconstitution of Spain. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo includes colonial Latin American literature as part of Spanish literature in his Historia de la poesía hispano-americana (1911) and even Jean Franco’s 1969 English edition of a Literary History of Spain: Spanish American Literature since Independence partially conflates Spanish and Spanish American literatures. Spanish literary histories also display enormous ambivalence on the value of colonial literature, and present the period and corpus as an intermediary cultural space between Spain and the Americas (Goic 1988, 24). This position also appears in literary histories such as the influential three-volume History of Spanish Literature (1849) by American literary scholar George Ticknor. Ticknor’s history became the standard for decades, even informing readers in Europe with translations in French, Spanish, and German. The position celebrating Spain’s discovery and a professedly new national cohesion in the name of progress epitomized nineteenth and twentieth-century intellectual currents and ideologies that took hold in Spain, and the US. Besides American Hispanophile George Ticknor, other prominent figures that contributed to this revisionist version of colonialism are Washington Irving (1828), William H. Prescott (1837, 1843), Justin Winsor (1884), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1846, 1966–82), Bernard Moses (1922), and the founder of the Hispanic Society of America, Archer M. Huntington, through his works and patronage. Among these actors, Washington Irving occupies a singular position in the history of Hispanism and colonial studies. As Rolena Adorno notes, Washington Irving’s multivolume literary biography of Christopher Columbus, A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (1828) (with 116 editions and a Spanish translation (1834) reprinted 14 times) was produced to portray the explorer as “the consummate heroic figure” for the United States to be “neither challenged or debated” (2002, 89). Biographies of Columbus and interpretations of the conquest multiplied in acts of historical appropriation seeking to produce enduring myths. The 1892 World’s Columbian Exposition (delayed until 1893), revived the history of colonialism and the imperial vision for the American 9

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias

public. For David Armitage, the celebration of the fourth centennial represents the desire for “national unity and historical identity that rested on an interpretation of Columbus as progressive and heroic” (1992, 54). Across the Americas, Hispanism and its obligatory celebration of the Spanish conquest confused and delayed the emergence of colonial Latin American studies.This movement was amplified even more by the number of Spanish writers and scholars who came to US universities after the First World War and, years later, in a second wave escaping the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Some that taught in US universities include keystone figures such as Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Américo Castro, and Federico de Onís. This influx of scholars from Spain who also published work on colonial Latin America coincided with the growing interest in research devoted to indigenous cultures of the Americas, race and mestizaje, and other themes that began to shift the intellectual basis for the study of the colonial experience. Oftentimes, US-based American scholars’ writings on colonial Latin America were at odds with earlier efforts by Spanish American Creoles during the nation-building process. A full understanding of the transhistorical and transnational dimensions of the colonial experience escapes the bounds of literary and historical production and analysis. One needs to pay attention as well to developments in architecture, the arts, and music, which often brought, in contradictory ways, cultural value to the “exotic” cultures and nature that had been colonized by Iberian powers. Governments or societies sponsoring museums and archives were at work as well, often in collaboration with universities for the continued plundering and appropriation of books and artifacts from Latin America. These kinds of extractive engagements had an old history; European missionaries who regarded indigenous sacred texts as evidence of their idolatry first tried to make sense of their writing system in ethnographical accounts before the massive burnings that left only a handful of manuscripts that reappeared intact centuries later in several European locations (Mignolo 1995; Boone, 2007). The plundering by colonial travelers, natural scientists, and missionaries had much to do with enlightened ideas and policies. European empires sought knowledge aggressively on what they perceived as “exotic” lands for their scientific developments and for commercial-colonial expansion. Over the last two decades, research on the history of science, archives, and material history has underscored the role of enlightened knowledge brokers such as Lorenzo Boturini Benaducci, Felipe Bauzá, Franco Dávila, Pierre Ledru, and Alexander von Humboldt (Pratt 1992; Delbourgo and Dew 2008; Kontler et al. 2014). Interdisciplinary research on their writings, mappings, and collecting practices unveils the wide array of dynamics of the production of knowledge as well as the complex negotiations entailed in exchanges to create new botanical gardens and archival collections. Botanical gardens established in major metropolitan centers during the second half of the eighteenth century introduced specimens from the Americas. After the Wars of Independence, several Latin American national museums received artifacts of pre-colonial and colonial origin for displays that brought national prestige to these institutions. The nation-building process often facilitated forms of imperial violence. For instance, during the post-independence literacy campaign, the Mexican priest and bibliophile José María Luis Mora Lamadrid exchanged the Chimalpahin Codex for protestant bibles from the British and Foreign Bible Society (Jacquot 2019). The exchange allowed the use of bibles for the literacy campaign.The Codex, a three-volume history of the Aztecs, was passed to Cambridge University in 1982. After a decision to sell the books in 2014, the public announcement of the auction by the international art company Christie’s alerted the Mexican government, which was able to negotiate the return of this important codex. Without losing sight of imperial ideologies always embedded in the collection and appropriation of local knowledges, Ricardo Salvatore argues that foreign scholars who participated in 10

Between colonialism and coloniality

what he calls the “disciplinary conquest” of South America, “claimed possession” of knowledge for their academic disciplines (2016, 11). For him, their intervention developed the field of regional knowledge of Latin America. The Yale Peruvian Expedition of 1911 that led Hiram Bingham to his fortuitous discovery of Machu Picchu remains as one of the most polemical academic-commercial ventures of the twentieth century. Kodak and National Geographic sponsored the second and third expeditions, and artifacts recovered were deposited at the Peabody Museum at Yale. Peru requested the return of objects in a highly controversial lawsuit that received international attention. In 2008, the government of Alan García successfully negotiated the return of artifacts in several installments (Orson 2010). For the development of colonial Latin American studies, this case demonstrates the role of imperiality in the forging of archives that serve as the foundation for the discipline. During the same period, Bernard Moses published his Spanish Colonial Literature in South America (1922). Moses, a social scientist who established the political science department at University of California, Berkeley late in his career, began to research the economic and political history of colonial Latin America. Of five books on the topic, the Hispanic Society of America published the last two. His literary history is one of the first attempts to cover South American writing in all genres up to 1810. As expected, he excluded indigenous authors, except for the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, who appears in most Hispanophile collections because of the more readable qualities of his writing for a European public. It would be fair to ask: why would a social scientist undertake such a project? He writes: “to know a nation’s life as known at any given epoch or to visualize the worldly show that passed before the thoughtful contemporary mind, one should refer, not to the artificial creation of the modern historian, with its twentieth-century atmosphere, but to what men wrote of their times or times near their own” (1922, 6). An exception to the nationalism and Hispanophile impetus that forged the field in the Americas and Europe can be found in the work and ideas of José Carlos Mariátegui and the 1920s Amauta magazine. Amauta (1926–1930) created an avant-garde network of intellectuals, writers, and visual artists with international recognition that came to define the project. Their contributions to modern politics, traditions, art, and particularly indigenismo represented well Mariátegui’s perspective for an avant-garde movement in Latin America. Mariátegui’s pluralistic vision, anchored in the celebration of difference, interrogates the nature of national literatures that excluded indigenous literatures created before the conquest. Literary writing under colonialism, indigenous survival, and the Quechua-Spanish dualism are central preoccupations in Mariátegui’s thought that contributed to the Latin Americanization of colonial studies and the inclusion of subaltern perspectives developed during the second half of the twentieth century. Another crucial moment in the study of Latin American colonial literature is organized around the study of the Baroque in the Americas, with significant critical interventions published from the 1940s until the present.5 The central argument of these artists and scholars is that although the Baroque began in Europe, the corresponding movement in the Americas was transformed to open the artistic and aesthetic arenas to the creolized and syncretic expressions of the complex array of populations, that included indigenous, Black and Asian cultural formations. The diversified contributions of the Baroque were later claimed as a central element in contemporary Latin American literature, through what Severo Sarduy (1974) and Haroldo de Campos (1989), among others, denominated as the neobaroque. Some of the names by which colonial Baroque in the Americas was reclaimed by Latin American critics were: Barroco de Indias (Picón Salas 1944; Acosta 1984); Barroco indígena; Barroco indo-hispánico; Barroco indiano (Roggiano 1978, 1994); Barroco americano, Barroco del Nuevo Mundo (Parkinson Zamora 2006); Barroco criollo, mundonovismo, lo real maravilloso (Carpentier 1964, 1975), neobarroso (Perlongher 1991), and 11

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias

Barroco latinoamericano. These new histories and debates broke the tie and, by doing so destabilized the romantic and encompassing Spanish Golden Age canon. Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo Walker’s Cambridge History of Latin American Literature (1996) still represents today a significant landmark in Latin American literary history. With the incorporation of changing theoretical perspectives, cultural studies, and coverage of Afro-Hispanic, Latinx, and colonial literature, these three volumes announced new directions for the twenty-first century. The broadening of colonial studies is demonstrated with eleven essays devoted to the period that brought light to further questions and authors who had been excluded from the canon.This important task of recovery and expansion of the colonial archive takes into account various themes including indigenous and mestizo perspectives, the influence of the law in historical writing, questions of authorship and intention, women in the lettered culture, the Barroco de Indias (colonial Baroque), the Spanish American Enlightenment, and interdisciplinary perspectives exemplified in the examination of the history of women in the convent.The expansion of the canon, announcing interconnected histories that serve as a point of departure for the hemispheric turn today (Negrón Muntaner 2020; Voigt 2016) is rendered in essays that link AfroHispanic and Afro-American authors as well as Brazilian and Spanish American literatures. Another critical connection examined in several essays in the Cambridge History is that of the literary production of 1960s Boom novelists and their mining of the colonial period. Alejo Carpentier, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others that followed such as Abel Pose, Antonio Benítez Rojo, and José Juan Saer reimagined episodes that brought back the violence and contradictions of the colonization and conquest. In 1981 Carpentier published La novela latinoamericana en vísperas de un nuevo siglo where he defined “la nueva crónica de Indias” (the new chronicle of the Indies) as the gold standard for shaping the new Latin American novel. In his view, the redeployment of colonial tropes and images of the unexpected and marvelous could inspire and define everyday life in Latin America. His significant intervention on the real maravilloso was tied to an understanding of the early years of the colonial experience, as well as Baroque aesthetics. In Tientos y Diferencias, Carpentier concludes that “the legitimate style for the Spanish American novelist is the baroque” (qt. in Oviedo 2001, 409). Far from the circuit included in the Cambridge History of Latin American Literature, critical paradigms from Latin America gained currency in US academia, making waves among colonial scholars. The arsenal of cultural theorizations by Fernando Ortiz, Oswald de Andrade, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Ángel Rama, and Antonio Cornejo Polar have been central in the critique of Eurocentrism and the decolonization of the nineteenth-century literary canon invented by enlightened Creoles. These key intellectuals entered the long-running debate about Latin American identity by addressing the nature of colonialism from perspectives that recognized the significance of anthropophagia and cannibalism (Andrade ([1928] 1991 and Fernández Retamar [1971] 1989), transculturation (Ortiz [1940] 1970 and Rama 1982), heterogeneity, vernacular Latin Americanisms, and colonial poetics (Cornejo Polar 1993, 1994, 2002). Oswald de Andrade and Roberto Fernández Retamar questioned in their work the representation of Americans as savages and cannibals by resignifying the notion of cannibalism as cultural difference and appropriation. Fernández Retamar theorized Americanness by appropriating the Shakespearean figures of Próspero and Calibán in the Caribbean region and exposing the symbolic dynamics between master and slave. Frederic Jameson wrote the foreword to the 1989 translation into English, which boosted Fernández Retamar’s positioning as a Caribbean postcolonial scholar of the same stature as other English-speaking Caribbean intellectuals (Hulme 2016).The Uruguayan scholar Rama advocated for socio-historical approaches, which moved criticism closer to the social sciences shifting the emphasis from literature to culture. His two main contributions to colonial studies are the adaptation of Fernando Ortiz’s anthropological notion of 12

Between colonialism and coloniality

transculturation into literary and cultural Latin American studies (1982) and the study of the lettered city (1984). As Hernán Vidal (1993) explains, his approach signaled an epistemological shift from literature to texts, discourses, and practices. Cornejo Polar’s notion of “latinoamericanismo vernáculo” referred to a combination of critical interventions produced from within the Latin American contexts, as well as the disciplinary terminologies and debates that emerged elsewhere but that developed a very particular meaning and set of inflections in the context of Latin American-based thought. According to Cornejo Polar, Latin American heterogeneity referred to an irreducible difference from which distinct cultural formations emerged. He devoted an important part of his thinking to analyzing the origins of critical and theoretical thought in Latin America, that he denominated as “poéticas coloniales” or “poéticas latinoamericanas” (Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana, 1996). These key Latin American thinkers provided a model for new interpretations of the disavowal of indigenous knowledge, orality and writing, the violence of the conquest, and the persistence of the colonial in the present. Caribbean scholars and thinkers have also been crucial in rethinking Latin American colonialism. In addition to the contributions by Fernando Ortiz and Roberto Fernández Retamar already mentioned, well-known theorizations on négritude and colonialism by Aimé Césaire (in collaboration with Léon Damas and Léopold Sédar Senghor) (1939, 1955), on the reappropriation of the figure of Calibán by Aimé Césaire (1969), as well as Edouard Glissant’s thinking on antillanité, creolization, relationality and opacity (1990, 1997a, 1997b, 1999) have reshaped contemporary debates on colonial and postcolonial Caribbean and Latin American studies. Frantz Fanon ([1952] 2008) and Sylvia Wynter (1970, 2003) have also made important interventions in thinking about the complexities of early modern and late colonialism in the Anglo, French and Spanish Caribbeans. All of these thinkers have engaged with the many complexities of colonialism in the Caribbean, an important area of development in the conceptualization of the field that has been crucial for comparative and hemispheric studies of the Americas.

Colonial Latinx studies An important aspect of colonial Latin American studies has been developed through the collaborations and interactions between Latinx and Latin American and Caribbean studies. These disciplinary exchanges require that we take into account the different intellectual genealogies informing Latin American and Caribbean studies in the US and in the Global South. In the US, for example, Latin American studies has developed institutionally under area studies and its financing has been linked to national security issues during the Cold War (Poblete 2003). In Latin America the field has been shaped within identity discourses in the context of the formation of nation-states (Mignolo 2000). Originally focused on Mexican American/Chicanx and Puerto Rican communities, Latinx studies is currently an expansive disciplinary formation that engages interdisciplinary methods and transnational critical canons in order to include modes of knowledge that emerge from ethnic communities that have experienced internal colonialism in the US. Due to the disparate contexts operating in the formation of the fields, the collaboration between colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies and Latinx studies is simultaneously organic and problematic. Coloniality and latinidad6 are not mutually exclusive. European imperial expansion reached across the Americas transforming territories, urbanizing, and reshaping native communities that later confronted or negotiated their place in colonial and neocolonial situations. Identities that configure latinidad have been determined by geography, historical trajectories, and cultural expressions nourished by myths of ancestral origins, accounts of survival, and coerced and voluntary migrations, displacements, and diasporas. The colonial period is also very important in 13

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias

the foundation of latinidad, and it has been a source of study in Latinx studies.7 Although some scholars have questioned the relationship between colonial texts written in Spanish, Portuguese and English and the US Latinx corpus, other critics have recognized certain iconic Latin American and Spanish American writers and artists as part of the Hispanic literary traditions in the United States. This critical move allows us to make visible the long history and cultural traditions from the Caribbean and Latin America in the US. Research on the emergence of Latinx identities and cultural production has been traditionally set in the 1960s, prompted by the civil rights and liberation movements. Increasingly, however, criticism, histories, and anthologies propose alternative origins such as 1848 and 1898 (referring to the central dates marking the current neocolonial relationship between the US, Mexico and the Hispanic Caribbean). Some critics include the conquest and colonization of the northern part of Mexico to create the Southwest of the US after the Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty in 1848 and claim important figures like Eulalia Perez and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton as foundational figures for the Latinx/Chicanx colonial archive (Stavans and Alcaraz 2000; Lima 2007).The Spanish exploration and settlement of what is currently the Southwest of the US has been claimed as the beginnings of Anglo-Hispanic relationships; this alternative conceptualization of history questions the white supremacist discourses that represent Latinxs as aliens to the history of modernity in the US (González 2000; Kanellos 2002; Coronado 2013). Others still trace its earliest expression to Spanish colonial testimonies and historical accounts by the first Europeans who arrived on the shores of Florida, and years later embarked on the imperial expansion of New Spain’s northern frontier. Juan Bruce-Novoa and Luis Leal set the foundations for the definition of a colonial Latinx genealogy. Luis Leal claimed that Chicanx literature is “that literature written by Mexicans and their descendants living or having lived in what is now the United States” (1979, 21), while Bruce Novoa proposed Cabeza de Vaca as the founder of Chicanx literature (Bruce-Novoa 1990). By writing literary history, Leal (1971) introduced colonial texts to the Latinx canon, making him one of the first Chicano critics to examine imperial texts as foundational discourses of the Latinx experience. He identified a pre-Renaissance stage that includes the chronicles by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1542), Fray Marcos de Niza (1539), Pedro de Castañeda (1542) and Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá (1610). Several forms of literary expression have been attached to the Latinx literary corpus, such as romances (ballads), décimas (ten-line verses), coplas (couplets), pastorelas (shepherd plays) and autos sacramentales (­passion plays). As part of the memory of the older generations in the Southwest, these songs underscore a different Americana that highlights Latinx agency in a complicated early American history.While the Southwest colonial expression is well represented in the Chicanx canon, there is a need to reconsider its geographical boundaries to include key chronicles, letters, and travel accounts from other frontier regions where Spanish colonists, First Nations, and runaway slaves from British plantations converged. Aztlán, the mythical home located in the Southwest of the US that has inspired generations of writers, could also be the point to consider in any attempt to find beginnings to Latinx cultural expression and history. The Aztec codices that imagined the migration from Aztlán to the South (Boturini, Aubin, or Azcatitlan) became part of the imperial archive next to histories of European conquests and settlements that often captured the angst of the unknown and feelings of displacement. Indeed, the conflation of north-south and transatlantic trajectories are indicative of the lasting legacies of colonialism that as Kristen Silva Gruesz argues, “underscore the deep connections between the racial formations, Creole nationalisms, and disavowals of indigeneity that developed in the post-contact ‘New’ World—and that have persisted to the present day in utter disregard of national borders” (2018, 289). There is no doubt that imperial designs amplified the multiple waves of migrations, and that changes in social and economic status were 14

Between colonialism and coloniality

forced by new destinations. Creoles sought their way out of imperial rule yet reaffirmed the Spanish roots that excluded Afro-descendants, African, Asian and Native American peoples. Joshua Simon argues that Creole revolutions need to be defined as “anti-imperial imperialism” (2017, 33). For him,“Creole patriots justified their rebellions by reference to arguments carefully tailored to impugn some, but not all of the inequalities that characterized their societies, claiming that their right to rule themselves originated in their forefathers’ conquest of the New World” (2). Transhistorical entanglements were complicated by the context and movement of colonial actors in different waves. Here we want to focus on two additional moments in the nineteenth century: first, the initial wave of Latin American insurgents from Mexico and South America during the wars of independence; and second, the circuit of Caribbean expatriates from Cuba and Puerto Rico who after 1850 traveled to Madrid and Paris and to cities such as New York, New Orleans, Boston, and Philadelphia. Still working for the struggles at their place of origin, these revolutionary subjects also found a new home in these metropolitan cities. With significant enclaves in Texas and California, the Spanish/Spanish American presence was felt first through the press. Nicolas Kanellos and Helvetia Martell identify the existence of Spanish and bilingual periodical publications dating back to 1808 (2000, 3–5). Creoles fleeing political persecution arrived in North American cities throughout the early years of the nineteenth century. Writing and publishing poetry, propaganda pamphlets, and chronicles helped define national identities, while also legitimizing political struggles on two fronts. As anti-colonial texts, these writings justified the Spanish American quest for freedom and, after the 1850s, accentuated the need for the abolition of slavery. Some iconic examples are: Servando Teresa de Mier’s edition of the Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias by Bartolomé de las Casas released by Philadelphia-based publisher J. Hurtel; and New York City Librería Americana y Estranjera’s publication of José Antonio Saco’s first edition of his Obras in 1853. As immigrants, political exiles, or natives from California and Texas to New Orleans, Philadelphia, and New York, Latinx writers have documented their lives and challenged their colonial or neocolonial situations. The history of periodical publications begun by Kanellos and Martell (2000) serves as evidence of Creoles’ revolutionary engagements against Spanish colonialism in the United States.Tied to these efforts are the political, social, and educational societies and clubs established by Cubans and Puerto Ricans during the second half of the nineteenth century. Among many other clubs, Los Independientes (1883), La Liga (1890), and Las Dos Antillas (1892) exemplify the need to educate and organize the community to bring social and political cohesion to New York City’s Latinx enclaves. As Hoffnung-Garskof writes, La Liga, founded by the Cuban Rafael Serra, had as its mission to educate the “class of color” to “advance the intellect and elevate the character” (2019, 51). Migration, labor, colonial politics, and racism were debated at societies and club meetings as well as in their publications. Sotero Figueroa, an important journalist, writer, printer, and political activist who moved from Puerto Rico to New York to escape political persecution, founded the Club Borinquen (1882) in collaboration with Francisco Gonzalo “Pachín” Marín, and with Arturo Schomburg he co-founded the club Las Dos Antillas (1892). Figueroa’s editorial talent gained him important positions as editor of Patria and La Revista Ilustrada de Nueva York. Working to create momentum for the independence of Puerto Rico and Cuba, he collaborated with José Martí and Rafael Serra; he also became a member of the Partido Revolucionario Cubano founded by Martí in 1892. Some of Figueroa’s most original contributions were published in its official weekly newspaper Patria. For example, the history of the Puerto Rican independence movement up to the Grito de Lares (1868) can be found in his essay “La verdad de la historia” (1892 in Patria). In this essay, he introduces the notion of “la raza de la libertad,” (the race of freedom) 15

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias

in which raza denotes a brave multiracial society unwilling to accept coloniality (Arias 2017, 25). The subject of abolitionism and the socio-racial realities of Afro-Caribbean immigrants played an important role in shaping revolutionary politics as an everlasting framework for the study of Blackness as part of the Latinx experience. Another key figure is Arturo Schomburg; his interest in the history of abolition and the Black diaspora—which included Spanish America and the Caribbean—inspired his writings and bibliographical undertakings. He created a multilingual archive of the Black experience in the Americas that would support him and others in connecting the legacy of transatlantic slavery with the claims for inclusion and in shifting social   aldés 2017; García Peña and political norms for Afro descendants (Sánchez-González 2001; V 2019; Negrón-Muntaner 2020). Latinx studies emerged as a field of study during the second half of the twentieth century, and today the inclusion of colonial studies within the field continues to be a work in progress. Archival and digital humanities projects such as the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage project (founded by Nicolás Kanellos in 1992) are creating awareness of the deepseated and complicated history of the Latinx communities in the US. In this project, one can get a glimpse into the rigors, limits, and contradictions entailed in community building through the literary expression and, as Kanellos has demonstrated, in debates running in broadsheets and books made available by the printing press. Recent scholarship and anthologies are challenging older periodizations, and recognizing the transnational nature, complicated affiliations and contingent geographies of latinidad. Borders imposed by imperial expansion are getting undone by the overt critique of colonialism placing indigenous perspectives at the center (Gruesz 2018). As scholars, we need to be critical of the pervasive ideologies of “imperial anticolonialism” (Simon 2017, 33) that moved legions of Spanish American Creoles to fight for independence and the abolition of slavery. Colonial Latinx studies is a fertile field for scholarship, that offers new ways of thinking about key categories such as nation and borderlands, language, historical periodizations in Latin America and the US and ethnic identities. Yet scholars need to be conscious of the many contradictions in this corpus, as well as the “hybrid and transnational context that requires critics and scholars to be vigilant about the ways in which archives often reproduce the logic of national, imperial and/or colonial imaginaries” (Martínez-San Miguel 2018b, 94). For example, claiming the first Spanish settlements in what today is the United States, and even in the rest of Latin America, as the single source of Latinx literary history is problematic because it replicates the imperial frameworks that identified European conquest and colonization as the beginning of Latin American literatures. More work needs to be done to recover forms of cultural memory, knowledge and identity that transcend the written accounts of the usual well-known figures in colonial Latin America. The inclusion of texts written by Spanish conquistadors, religious figures, and colonial functionaries as part of the Latinx canon also requires the development of new frameworks that would allow the reader to focus on early historical periods that are relevant for the understanding of the Latinx literary and cultural imaginary. Some scholars are already conducting comparative Ibero/ American early modern studies (Bauer 2003a) and colonial Latinx studies (Goldmark 2017, 2019) to foster an exchange of knowledges and discursive analysis strategies that should eventually transform both fields of inquiry. An interesting contribution of this body of work is that for Latinx studies scholars the links between colonialism in the Caribbean and Latin American regions from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century are explicit and become the source of very intentional critical interventions. In that context, the study of the colonial past is often linked to contemporary practices of exclusion, marginalization and alienation from US history that are based on racist conceptualizations that took form in the colonial period. This is an important topic for decolonial critics, who 16

Between colonialism and coloniality

focus on the common colonial background that links Latin Americans and Latinxs in their relationship with the US (Maldonado-Torres 2006; Figueroa 2020). We will now discuss some of the productive intersections between colonial, postcolonial and decolonial studies.

Postcolonial and decolonial Caribbean studies and Latin American studies8 In the last four decades, a whole new series of approaches have revitalized our understanding of colonization, conquest and imperialism across time and space, namely, the generative collaborations with and the debates brought by postcolonial and decolonial thinkers. It is interesting to note that postcolonial and decolonial studies emerged and became prevalent in the 1980s, right after colonial Latin American studies underwent a crucial redefinition of its main methodological approaches by expanding its object of study beyond the disciplinary confines of literature (Adorno 1988; Mignolo 1989). Colonial studies re-emerged as a field within Latin American studies with the publication of several influential monographs engaging key concepts and themes relevant across disciplines. In 1990, historian Patricia Seed published “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse,” a compelling review in the pages of the Latin American Research Review that prompted additional responses by Hernán Vidal (1993),Walter Mignolo (1993), and Rolena Adorno (1993). These responses provided a historical trajectory, defined new engagements, and questioned the Eurocentric character of the canon. Literary close readings to examine alphabetic textual representations and aesthetic concerns became part of what Seed defines as an “emergent interdisciplinary critique of colonialism known as colonial discourse” (1991, 182). Some of the main questions of postcolonial theory became possible after Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). This foundational book interrogated the Eurocentric assumptions informing area studies programs in the United States and Asian studies more specifically. Reflecting on the decolonization in the twentieth century of former English and French colonies, a few years later Gayatri Spivak (1987), Homi Bhabha (1994), Paul Gilroy (1995) and Stuart Hall (1996) conceptualized ways in which colonial subjects constitute their identities under colonialism and after. Although postcolonial theory resonated profoundly in the Caribbean region—where many of the countries of the Anglo Caribbean became independent just as the decolonization of several countries in Africa was taking place (1960s to 1980s)—many Latin American and Caribbean critics aimed to correct the Anglo-European postcolonial paradigm and set the stage for new dialogues. Postcolonialism has been particularly productive for the study of nationalism, multilingual literary and cultural productions and migratory and exilic experiences from the Global South to the First World (Figueroa 2016; Nerlekar 2016). Caribbean studies scholars like Shalini Puri (2004) and Stuart Hall (1996) have successfully used notions such as mimicry and hybridity to think about the creolized, transcultural, and translocal cultural productions of the Caribbean, a point of encounter of European, Asian and African subjects. In the case of Latin America, however, postcolonial theory became a problematic framework since it did not distinguish colonialism between 1492 and 1800 and the colonization and decolonization process taking place in the Global South primarily in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Coronil 1996, 2008). Jorge Klor de Alva (1995) and Maldonado-Torres (2017) have interrogated the use of postcolonialism in the Latin American context, since the criollos leading the independence movements did not advocate for the creation of national formations that were fundamentally different from the Eurocentric oppressive structures of the colonial period. Coloniality at Large, edited by Mabel Moraña, Enrique D. Dussel and Carlos A. Jáuregui (2008), offers one of the most comprehensive discussions about the tensions between Latin American and postcolonial studies. 17

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias

Given the problematic condition of some countries that have not attained national independence or political sovereignty (as is the case of almost half of the Caribbean countries), Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin’s alternative definition of postcolonialism has become quite productive: ‘Post-colonial’ as we define it does not mean ‘post-independence,’ or ‘after colonialism,’ for this would be to falsely ascribe an end to the colonial process. Post-colonialism, rather, begins from the very first moment of colonial contact. It is the discourse of oppositionality which colonialism brings into being. (1995, 117)

However, this reframing of the postcolonial does not solve all the tensions between postcolonialists and colonial Caribbean studies. As Silvio Torres-Saillant has noted, postcolonial theory gained an international reputation often at the expense of prominent Caribbean thinkers like Sylvia Wynter, George Lamming, Aimé Césaire, Alejo Carpentier, and Frantz Fanon (2003, 43). Torres-Saillant shares Hall’s (1996) reservations about the limits of the universalizing impulse of postcolonialism. He also shares with Patrick Williams (1999) the concerns about the erasure of the Caribbean origins of foundational figures such as Frantz Fanon. Furthermore, Vicente L. Rafael has questioned the effectiveness of a term like postcolonialism to understand regions that experienced more than one form of imperial domination, or in non-sovereign regions that have lived extended periods of colonial subordination (1993, ix–xvi). Parallel to the emergence and boom of postcolonial studies, a new theoretical paradigm focusing on coloniality, or the legacies of colonialism, emerged in Latin America and soon became very popular. In the early 1990s, sociologist Aníbal Quijano (2000) consolidated a series of theorizations around the notion of the “coloniality of power.” Quijano’s work focuses on the epistemic, racial and political legacies of colonialism after the wars of independence in continental Latin America and uses the case of Peru as his point of departure. He studies the structural and symbolic legacies of colonialism by deconstructing the racial paradigm that defines white Europeans as the center of Western cultures, and that locates African and indigenous subjects at the margins of the colonial and national orders. Quijano’s work is nourished by previous studies on dependency, internal colonialism and the currency of colonialism in Latin America.9 For the specific case of the Caribbean, Martínez-San Miguel (2014) has proposed “coloniality of diasporas” as an adaptation of Quijano’s term to name the coloniality operating in the coercive migration experienced by a series of creolized societies (constituted by translocal populations from Europe, Africa, and Asia), and where the native populations were displaced or annihilated early on. The decolonial turn takes as the point of departure 1492 and colonialism in Latin America. Decolonial thinkers conjoin the global dissemination of modernity with the centrality that colonialism had in the articulation of a capitalist world-order (Maldonado-Torres 2017; Mignolo 2009). In dialogue with thinkers from the Third World, as well as with Chicana theorizing (Pérez 1999; Sandoval 2000) closely linked to women-of-color feminism of the 1980s and 1990s (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983;  Anzaldúa 1987; Mohanty et al. 1991), decolonial theory focuses on the legacies of colonialism in knowledge production and in the definition of the human (Maldonado-Torres 2016, 2017). For Caribbean and Latin American cultural studies, one of the most important contributions of decolonial theory has been its call to consider the legacies of colonialism in contemporary epistemic, legal, political, and social discourses, practices and spaces. Another crucial contribution has been the deconstruction of the Eurocentric and white supremacist frameworks behind most of the nation-building projects in Latin America, led by Creole elites who did not decolonize 18

Between colonialism and coloniality

their social structures in the process of seeking political emancipation from Europe or the US (Maldonado-Torres 2017, 119–120). Decoloniality aspires, then, to culminate the incomplete process of decolonization and national state formation. Some of the main thinkers of the ­decolonial turn in Latin American and Caribbean studies, have substantial training in colonial studies (like Sylvia Wynter, Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Walter Mignolo, for example). Others have begun to engage with important figures of the time period, like Guaman Poma de Ayala, although with varying degrees of in-depth analysis and contextualization. Perhaps as a result of the field’s call to decolonize its epistemic frameworks, the Caribbean region has become a crucial space from which to reconceptualize Latin American colonial studies (Morales 1974; Puri 2004;  Torres-Saillant 2006). Although the Caribbean was one of the first points of contact between European conquerors and American natives, the region has often been displaced to focus on the tierra firme (or the continental Americas) as the privileged locus for the study of colonialism. This is why the foci of most of the literary and cultural histories have been the former viceroyalties of Mexico, Peru, New Granada and Río de La Plata, while colonial Caribbean studies is an area that still needs further expansion and development. One of the critical interventions of this companion is the solid inclusion of the Caribbean as a central region in thinking about the colonial period in the Americas. The Circum-Caribbean regions allow us to engage contributions on hemispheric and comparative colonial studies. British, French, and Dutch colonialism influenced Iberian imperial policies and colonial practices, and each imperial regime had distinctive features that have been addressed in comparative studies (Torres-Saillant 1997; Martínez-San Miguel 2016). The Caribbean, a History of the Region and Its People (2011), edited by Stephan Palmié and Francisco Scarano, offers a very compelling overview of the different colonial regimes established in the region. Furthermore, the study of the Caribbean shifts the temporal frame of the colonial Americas. In the Spanish Antilles, colonialism did not end with the wars of independence in the early nineteenth century; some of these communities did not become independent until the 1960s, or the 1980s, and others are still colonial and neocolonial dependencies today.With this in mind, this volume examines Caribbean colonialism until 1898, in order to focus on the period in which almost the entire Caribbean, with the exception of Haiti, was a European dependency. Another important decolonial intervention in the field of colonial Latin American studies has been the critical study and engagement with the different populations that played crucial roles in early modern Latin American and Caribbean societies.The inclusion of indigenous oral and written cultures and performances in Miguel León Portilla (1962) and Nathan Wachtel’s (1977) projects on “the vision of the vanquished” served as a precursor to recent studies on khipus, textiles, codices, pictorial documents and oral traditions, indigenous materialities and performances (Adorno 1988, 1993; Salomon 2004; Brokaw 2010; Dean 2010). More recently, several colonial historians and cultural critics are analyzing the verbal, visual, symbolic and cultural textualities, social practices and materialities produced by diasporic populations from Africa and Asia that became creolized in the Americas to complicate notions like mestizaje and mulataje in the region (Bennett 2006, 2009; Catelli 2020; López-Calvo 2009; López 2013; and others). Although “transculturation” and “créolité” originally made reference to the African and Asian components of the colonial populations in the Americas (Ortiz [1940] 1970; Bernabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant 1989), until very recently nationalist and criollista discourses privileged white supremacist accounts of Latin American and Caribbean cultural discourses. Other scholars have problematized ethnic and identitarian notions imposed on American born and raised populations, such as “indio,”  “taíno,”  “Andean,” ethnoracial formations like the ones represented in the “pintura de castas,” the presumed whiteness of Creole populations, etc. (Hulme 1992; Silverblatt 1995; Martínez-San Miguel 2011; Catelli 2012). 19

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias

Latin American and Caribbean colonial studies have become a richer field of study as a result of its dialogue, tensions and contentions with postcolonial and decolonial studies. Postcolonial theory encouraged Latin Americanists and Caribbeanists to argue in favor of the importance of the insular and Global South Americas to be included in the theorization of the colonial and postcolonial. The decolonial turn takes the colonial experience in the Americas as an important point of departure, but it also insists on engaging in comparative studies of colonialism and coloniality from Third World and Global South frameworks (Maldonado-Torres 2016, 2017; Martínez-San Miguel 2016) to identify common and distinctive strategies of dehumanization in contexts of imperial expansion.

Inter- and transdisciplinary turns in colonial studies Colonial Caribbean and Latin American studies have developed at the crossroads of several fields: history, archaeology, anthropology, and cultural studies. Theories and critical approaches developed in the study of colonial Latin America have contributed significantly to the understanding of the historiography and cultural production of local regions, political and economic processes, and social life in regions marked by the pervasive legacy of colonialism. While teaching and research on colonialism and coloniality has been tied to nineteenth-century disciplinary distinctions, current scholarship has benefited from and contributed to theories, approaches, and knowledge produced in dialogue with other disciplines. These interdisciplinary dynamics, long in the making, were prompted by overlapping interests and debates that have encouraged inquiries and collaborations expanding the field, posing greater challenges and calling for interdisciplinary thinking. Interdisciplinarity has broadened the research and teaching base by crossing disciplinary borders while either maintaining a strong footing in a discipline, or negating traditional disciplinary practices all together. Although some scholars in the field still function within their disciplinary bounds, increasingly forms of interdisciplinarity have been making waves enabling dialogue among researchers from different fields, integrating new methods and theories, reorganizing forms of knowledge, and challenging previous findings with new questions of greater complexity that could potentially expand the audience and transnational dimension of the field. There are various forms of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary practices current in the humanities: asking questions relevant to two or more disciplines (synthetic interdisciplinarity), proposing methods of research that transcend existing disciplinary methods to satisfy new research questions (transdisciplinarity), and/or proposing approaches to questions with filters and ideas from several disciplines often “without a compelling disciplinary basis” (Lattuca 2001, 83). In colonial Latin American studies, self-conscious interdisciplinarians navigate the tension between disciplinary approaches and the varied practices described above. With such tactics, the study of Latin American antiquities and the colonial past have gained urgency and purchase in the production of scholarship and the academic curriculum. Programs in American studies, Latinx/Latin American studies, women’s, gender and sexuality studies, and various kinds of seminars and team-taught courses are now paying more attention to the study of colonialism. A vital tool to engage in interdisciplinarity has been the use of keywords or critical terms to approach the colonial experience. In Traveling concepts (2002), Mieke Bal explains that the abstract notion of a concept serves the act of interpretation; concepts that are performative in nature travel “between disciplines, between historical periods, and between geographically dispersed academic communities” (24) revealing hidden questions, perceptions, and considerations awaiting cultural analysis.The currency of these epistemological tools, like the canon, is continuously changing. The meanings of concepts change as well, particularly when crossing disciplinary and 20

Between colonialism and coloniality

cultural boundaries. In their crossing between disciplines, they “transform the boundaries” (Neumann and Nünning 2014, 3) Concepts are embedded in theories and disciplines that are also geographically and culturally situated. In Critical Terms for Caribbean and Latin American Thought/Términos críticos en el pensa­ miento caribeño y latinoamericano:Trayectoria histórica e institucional, the editors tackle the problem of translation by paying attention to the different historical and institutional genealogies of Latin American and Caribbean studies in the US and the Global South.Taking as a point of departure twelve keywords that are represented as false cognates for US-based and Latin American and Caribbean-based researchers and cultural critics, this volume re-examines the colonial period by tracing the coordinated and independent developments in studies of at least seven keywords that are central for colonial studies: indigenismo, americanismo, colonialism, coloniality, criollismo, mestizaje and transculturation. Following the lead of the bilingual dictionary of Robert McKee Irwin and Mónica Szurmuk’s Diccionario de estudios culturales latinoamericanos (2009)/Dictionary of Latin American Cultural Studies (2012), Critical Terms explores a dialogical model of knowledge production—through lead and response essays—to showcase the epistemic continuities and gaps in contemporary Latin American and Caribbean studies. More recently, Juan Poblete has invited a group of scholars to consider the development of Latin American studies through a series of theoretical turns in New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power (2018), reinflecting the notion of keywords through the idea of the schools of thought and the disciplinary debates that have promoted paradigm shifts in the field. Paradigm shifts that we associate with postcolonial and subaltern studies have invoked interdisciplinary scholarship to define Latin American colonial studies since the mid-1980s. The commitment to close reading inherited from New Criticism and more rigorous historical contextualization from New Historicism have paved the way for interdisciplinary collaborations and borrowings. These initial operations caused some trepidation because of the fear of applying anachronistic models or of lack of attention to linguistic and contextual differences (Cornejo Polar 2002; Castro-Klaren 2008).With careful consideration of these claims, the field has moved away from traditional practices of textual close readings to implement expansive modes of ­discursive, semiotic and material analyses. Interdisciplinary engagements have underwritten a deepening of our understanding of “the colonial” and its roots, tensions, impact, and redefinitions forced by border crossing. The multifaceted character of the objects of study in the field was enriched by ­interdisciplinary engagement with colonial written sources. Since most of the contemporary disciplines still carry the legacies of nineteenth-century knowledge systems, and most imperial writers were educated in European universities under the trivium and quadrivium classical curricula that dominated until the eighteenth century, it is not surprising to read major claims about multi-discursivity in the first chroniclers’ accounts (Pupo Walker 1982). Except for theater and poetry, most colonial narratives are impossible to categorize within known modern genres. Furthermore, to fully grant meaning to these texts, readers are usually only trained to make connections with European classical thought and rhetoric, at times making it difficult to identify cross-cultural patterns of borrowings and manipulations originating from other discursive and linguistic traditions.This is why it was so crucial for colonial studies to undergo the paradigm shift that took place in the 1980s that allowed the scholarship in the field to critically re-examine and redefine discursive analysis from inter/transdisplinary and ­transcultural perspectives. Recent epistemological turns have promoted a broader push for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary scholarship in convergence with cultural studies.These turns or shifts are embedded in previous disciplinary knowledge, yet open the field for sustained cross-fertilizations. Archival, translation, subaltern, spatial, transatlantic and hemispheric studies are just a few of the most 21

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias

relevant epistemological shifts for colonial scholars today. The epistemic turn that situated discursive analysis beyond verbal and written languages, and that can be linked to Mignolo’s formulation of “colonial semiosis” (1989), signaled a whole array of analytical moves that allowed for the conceptualization of human communication in very expansive terms (Valdeón 2014). After the publication of Michel Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972) and Jacques Derrida’s Archival Fever (1995), the archive re-emerged as an analytical category in cultural studies thus underscoring another form of materiality that could deepen our understanding of the sources and afterlife of books and manuscripts that constitute the canon. Critical archival studies demonstrates that historical repositories, museums and document collections are not comprehensive, exhaustive or a closed system; they constitute a subjective selection of documentary sources that cannot account for the unequal access and limited roles of marginal subjects in the production of knowledge. Archives also represent a shifting corpus that operates on value judgments, and political and personal agendas that replicate social hierarchies of the past. As pieces of evidence they form the raw material of colonial discourses often supplemented by alternative forms of knowledge production such as oral histories, and visual artifacts. Some of the most pointed interventions on the archive can be found in the work by MichelRolph Trouillot (1995), Diana Taylor (2003), and Laura Ann Stoler (2009). Trouillot suggested that historical narratives, a by-product of the archive, are constituted by a particular bundle of silences (27), while Taylor questioned the archive as an unmediated repository of information and proposed it instead as a repertoire that includes embodied acts, and forms of ephemeral knowledge (Taylor 2003). Finally, Stoler examines the archive as a space and practice bound to ideological practices embedded in the production of meaning. As each one of the cultural turns discussed here, the archive leads us to other turns. One important aspect of the examination of the archive is the mobility and spatio-temporal dimensions of the production of knowledge that one encounters in the critical study of the archive. Anthony Higgins (2000), Jeanette A. Bastian (2003), Herman Bennett (2009), Melanie Newton (2013), Anna More (2013), Marisa Fuentes (2018), and Larissa Brewer García (2020), among many others, have posed crucial questions that have contributed to a radical transformation in the methods used to curate and study colonial archives in Latin America and the Caribbean. As Johannes Fabian demonstrates in Language and Colonial Power (1986), translation was also central to the establishment of colonial rule as another form of violence, control, and the imposition of hegemonic culture through communication. Beyond Fabian, other postcolonial scholars have expanded the debates on the symbolism of translation as a technology for empire building (Niranjana 1992; Robinson 2014; Rafael 2016; Cheyfitz and Harmon 2018). Translations enabled the appropriation and circulation of knowledge across the globe, thus alleviating anxieties about imperial propaganda, which justified intraimperial rivalry, and religious conflict. The strong tradition of Hispanism in northern European countries expanded the visibility of the imperial/colonial archive with translations that still serve scholars today in comparative studies. Introductions and annotations to the translations sketch the significance of the colonial corpus for the study of intra-imperial tensions. Since the sixteenth century, eyewitness accounts and histories of the Spanish conquest have been filtered and manipulated by rival empires. One of the most emblematic texts of the period, Bartolomé de las Casas’s Brevísima relación de las Indias (1552), became the first Spanish “bestseller” in multiple translations in French, Dutch, and English during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Hart 2008). The commercialization of books in translation became the central source for the transcultural circulation of knowledge during the second half of the eighteenth century. Foreign translations, particularly in English, were used as propaganda that amplified the Black Legend against Spain. Juan Bautista Muñoz’s Historia del Nuevo Mundo (1793) and Creole Jesuits’ regional histories were translated almost 22

Between colonialism and coloniality

immediately into English, French, German, or Italian. Introductions to the translations served as political acts, often denying Spain of the purported exceptionalism proclaimed in its imperial histories. An interesting case is Francisco Javier Clavijero’s Historia antigua de Megico, released in Spanish in 1826, thirty-seven years after its first publication in an Italian translation (1780–81). In Madrid, the 1784–85 heated debate over Clavijero’s assertion of the value of indigenous knowledge derailed the Spanish publication but could not stop the politicized 1787 English and 1789 German translations that followed.Therefore, translations played a key role in the recognition of Creole Jesuits’ “patriotic epistemologies” (Cañizares Esguerra 2001), which shaped the Spanish American imperative to co-opt indigenous cultural history for the construction of a multicultural society. Translation, as a critical concept, is bound to two key colonial processes: translocality and globalization, which are tied as well to the spatial turn and mobility studies. Postcolonial studies, a turn by itself discussed in the previous section, has brought more awareness to space and place and the violence and legacy of colonialism over human, physical, and natural geographies. One could argue that these epistemological turns as analytical categories are neatly entangled. This imbrication of modes of thought and methods of inquiry seems fitting for colonial studies as it demonstrates the complexity of the remains of the colonial experience. Colonialism and postcolonialism were also closely related to the emergence of subaltern studies in the 1980s and 1990s (Guha, Chatterjee and Jeganathan 1983; Spivak 1988b). The Latin American Subaltern Studies Group was founded in 1992 (Founding Statement, 1993) and several scholars working on Latin American colonial studies like Walter Mignolo (1995, 2000), José Rabasa, Javier Sanjinés and Robert Carr (1994), Gustavo Verdesio (2002, 2005), John Beverley (1999) and Patricia Seed (1994) engaged in this framework to broaden the objects and subjects of study of the field. The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, edited by Ileana Rodríguez (2001) presents a compelling overview of the debates, contributions and challenges of this approach. Michael Horswell (2006) includes a thought-provoking intervention in his book Decolonizing the Sodomite, when he explores Inca Garcilaso’s blind spots on issues of gender and sexuality in the Andean region, and poses the question about the extent to which one subaltern group can speak for another. The paradigm shift promoted by subaltern studies also opened the field to a whole series of theoretical approaches on the multiple dimensions of otherness that complicate the colonial condition, such as gender and sexuality studies, critical race studies as well as studies on colonialism and embodiment, which are the focus of contributions included in this volume. The spatial turn represents a pervasive theoretical shift that has repositioned the field of geography and helped rework the relationship between the humanities and social sciences. Just as geography has embraced the cultural turn, over the last two decades, other disciplines asserted that space must be a key element in any attempt to understand social relations, ideologies, and practices. Imperial and colonial discourses have always imagined, rationalized, and reconfigured geographical space and its historical genesis. Early accounts of indigenous contact held a privileged position in the empire’s geo-historical archive because they pointed to the potential for political, economic, and cultural advancement inherent to Europe’s civilizing mission. Such reconstitutions of early colonial knowledge are central to the emerging critique of the Enlightenment and to the examination of geographical imaginaries that justified political dominance over less powerful societies and new ecological relations. If there is anything that radically distinguishes the colonial imagination, it is the geographical element. As Edward Said (1978) remind us, imperialism, after all, is an act of geographic violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control. The spatial turn has influenced other analytical shifts with great potential for the study 23

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias

of colonial Latin America. We often refer to studies of space and place, which convey a fundamental conceptual difference in examinations of the situated nature of experience. Place is a fundamental concept in postcolonial thought, particularly in the dimensions it brings to historical analysis and subjectivity. Edward Casey has outlined the critical distinction between space and place that bears on the understanding of modernity, processes of identity construction, and the knowledge of time and history. He goes on to claim,“every place that figures into geography is affected by history and is a fortiori cultural in status” (2002, 266). Colonial scholars have conducted significant work on different notions of space and place in relationship to colonialism and empire (Dym and Offen 2011). Attention to the relaciones geográficas began with the work of art historian Barbara Mundy (1996), who as well as other art historians has paid attention to identity and the visual imagination of colonial subjects (Carrera 2011; Bleichmar 2012, 2017). Other chief themes of the field include the imperial vision, indigenous agency and the production of scientific knowledge (Scott 2009; Valverde and Lafuente 2009; Safier 2012; Candiani 2014), textuality (Padrón 2004), frontiers (Reinhartz and Saxon 2005) and the complex politics of evangelization in the space of the mission (Díaz Balsera 2005; del Valle 2009a, b; El Jaber 2011). The study of colonialism and coloniality as a situated experience and practice offers vast possibilities to rethink power/knowledge relations, questions of scale, population, race relations, and sexuality and gender. Some important areas to consider include the study of the tensions of urban development and envisioning of the Spanish traza, indigenous notions of communal, political and economic spaces like the ayllu, the altepetl, and milpas, as well as the organization of alternative African Afro-descendants’ socialization spaces in the palenques, cofradías and cabildos. Attention to space and place has played an important role in ecocriticism, urban studies, and order variants of spatial turns such as the hemispheric turn, discussed below, and transatlantic, Pacific, and global studies. Ecocritical perspectives in post/colonial studies evolved at the intersection of the study of literary representations of the environment, ecological relations, and colonialism. As several scholars across disciplines have argued (Melville 1997; Funes Monzote 2009, Cushman 2015), it is evident that early modern forms of coloniality destroyed natural habitats and forests, and depleted mineral resources with devastating consequences for future generations. Observations on nature, climates, rainforests, river systems, and ecological relations are prominent in colonial and imperial discourses that sought to apprehend geography and nature for science and investments in the new territories. Approaches to natural sciences and the environment across disciplines are still considered “hanging fruit” because of the pervasiveness of coloniality for environmental concerns today and the need to understand the roots of the Anthropocene and its connection to capitalism (Paravisini-Gebert 2014; DeLoughrey 2019). In the late 1990s and early 2000s colonial Latin American studies interacted with two spatially informed turns that questioned the artificial isolation of the field due to its postnational focus in the Caribbean and Latin America. On the one hand, the transatlantic turn reclaimed important historical links between Europe and the Americas for the proper understanding of the early modern colonial/imperial contexts. Ruth Hill (2000), Viviana Díaz Balsera (2005, 2018), Barbara Fuchs (2003, 2013), Ricardo Padrón (2004), Herman Bennett (2006, 2018), Lisa Voigt (2009) and Benita Sampedro (2019), have explored the notion of the early modern period, and have promoted the historical and cultural rearticulation of pre-1800 literary and cultural movements. Indigenous epistemologies and transatlantic studies inform Viviana Díaz Balsera’s Guardians of Idolatry: Gods, Demons and Priests in Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón’s Treatise of Heathen Superstitions (2018), a monograph that delves into the intriguing dimension of the “conjuros”— powerful conjurations of word, human desire and imagination—to offer us a complex view of the many ways in which indigenous communities in the Americas shared the “preternatural,” 24

Between colonialism and coloniality

a border space between the marvelous and the superhuman, with many other communities in Europe of the same time period. Nina Gerassi-Navarro and Eyda Merediz (2009) curated a special issue of Revista Iberoamericana entitled “Otros estudios transatlánticos. Lecturas desde lo latinoamericano” that included several contributions focusing on transatlantic colonial studies. Ileana Rodríguez and Josebe Martínez (2011) also edited a three-volume compilation of essays, Estudios transatlánticos postcoloniales, that explore the productive intersections between transatlantic and postcolonial studies. The richness and vibrancy of this field has recently been showcased in the compilation Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia and Africa co-edited by Cecilia Enjuto Rangel et al. (2019). The transatlantic paradigm has led scholars to consider the Pacific as part of a new oceanic turn of growing influence in the comparative study of colonialism and coloniality (Thompson 2010; Padrón 2020). These perspectives connect land and sea in a conversation about the creation of transnational networks, the circulation of knowledge and objects, and mappings reflecting these movements (Armitage, Bashford and Sivasundaram 2017). The hemispheric turn on the other hand focuses on interconnections within the Americas, and according to Ralph Bauer “has generally emphasized the relations among and similarities between the literatures and cultures of the New World, focusing on what distinguishes the cultures and literatures of the New World at large from that of the Old - the colonial past and neocolonial present, for example, racial and cultural diversity, processes of transculturation and creolization, and so on” (2010, 250).The hemispheric turn emerged in the 1990s with the need to open the field of American literary studies geographically and culturally and as a reaction to the appropriation of anachronistic paradigms that tend to ignore the multiethnic cultural production of the colonial Americas. Important collaborations emerged around the Early Ibero/Anglo Americanist Summits organized by Ralph Bauer, David A. Boruchoff and other colleagues in 2002 and 2004, where scholar/teachers of Ibero-American and Anglo-American colonial literature explored interdisciplinary collaborative pedagogical and research projects to conduct studies of hemispheric colonial literature of the Americas. More recently, scholars like Kirsten Silva Gruesz (2002), Lázaro Lima (2007), Raúl Coronado (2013), María Josefina Saldaña (2016), Lorgia García Peña (2016), and Juliet Hooker (2017) have conducted work focusing on comparative north-south studies, as well as research projects that revitalize the hemispheric connections between American, African American, Latin American and Latinx studies. As we can see from this very brief review of some of the most significant epistemic turns in literary and cultural criticism, colonial studies is a subfield of Caribbean and Latin American studies with deep roots in various disciplines (i.e., history, literature, economics, art history, religion, anthropology, geography) that has been susceptible to the amplification of academic positionings or critical turns that have challenged and revitalized critical inquiries about colonialism. This shifting terrain is indebted to interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary practices across the humanities and social sciences that have renewed and transformed the field. Some scholars have remained faithful to their disciplinary training, while others have taken new directions by collaborating or embracing theories and methodologies from other disciplines that have resulted in notable paradigm shifts. These activities have expanded traditional time frames, documented networks in the production and circulation of knowledge, and have provided enduring questions and themes that can only be approached beyond disciplinary bounds.

Contributions in this volume It is within this critical juncture that this volume seeks to define, introduce, and offer a sample of the new thinking animating the study of colonial Latin America. While the essays included here survey the state of the field, they also seek to present new avenues of research that 25

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias

demonstrate the growing significance of the interdisciplinary study of colonialism and (de)coloniality at the Latin American geographical axis. Casting a wider net, our collaborators examine cultural products across regions and boundaries, bringing into play perspectives from philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, critical race theory, geo and ecocriticism, religion, linguistics, and literary and cultural studies. This volume presents new readings of pre-contact and colonial discourses, institutional histories, material practices, and forms of cultural expression to interrogate how first peoples, and later colonial societies were ordered and controlled, and how colonial subjects were raised from the colonial condition to claim legitimacy.This inclusive approach captures the voices of lettered elites, and also brings to the fore the cultural expression of indigenous and Black subjects, women, and religious intellectuals seeking to shed light on the violent nature of colonialism, and its paradoxical intellectual engagements representing distinctive individual and collective experiences, as well as interpretations of history. While the focus of this volume is colonial Latin America, we approach this project understanding that early modern colonialism sparked a global transformation involving the development of inter-imperial and intra-colonial relations that cannot be obscured. These contributions account for the complex web and interconnected nature of imperial expansion. Using four overarching themes, this volume examines a wide array of issues that demonstrate the critical significance of colonial Latin America and the Caribbean across disciplines, national traditions, and historical periods.We seek to present a view of Latin America and the Caribbean as an axis connecting Europe, Africa, and Asia, as well as the Atlantic and the Pacific through Iberian global engagements. Many of the essays in this volume reiterate the persistent influence and movement of people, commodities, and ideas that circulated north and south, and through the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. The first section on “Colonialism and coloniality” includes a collection of chapters that explore keywords that define and think about colonialism and its legacies in Caribbean and Latin American studies. These essays revisit some of the most prominent recent debates in literary, cultural, historical and philosophical studies about colonialism in Latin America and the Caribbean, such as race (Nemser), subalternity (Graubart), mestizaje (Catelli), criollismo (Mazzotti), orality-literacy (Brokaw), the decolonial turn (Maldonado Torres), the ecocritical turn (ParavisiniGebert), and visual and cinematic studies (Poblete).This first cluster of essays discusses the intellectual roots and material practices that enabled empire building and forms of contestation that shaped global coloniality, identities, and territories. The contributions to this section focus on central notions in colonial studies informing crucial events that brought meaning to Spanish colonialism and to its long-lasting legacies. “Knowledge production and networks” is the second section of this companion and it addresses the epistemological basis of colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies and the manner in which knowledge was produced, circulated, and appropriated during the colonial period. The debate on the human condition of indigenous populations and the nature of cannibalism, closely linked to public discussion about the humanity of the colonial subjects encountered in the Americas are revisited here to think about the foundations of colonialism as epistemic dispossession (Hill, Madureira). These essays also engage comparative colonial studies, by exploring Portuguese colonialism in Brazil (Madureira, Cagle), Spanish imperialism in the Pacific (Blanco) and late colonial discourses on race in the Caribbean (Merediz). The contributions collected here also analyze how global exchanges created networks of knowledge that hierarchized the contributions by Creoles, indigenous, or diasporic colonial subjects (Merediz, Hill). This section also incorporates comparative studies that critically re-engage transatlantic and transpacific studies. 26

Between colonialism and coloniality

The essays included in “Materialities and archives” address the significant transformations of the field when the focus shifted from verbal and written documents to the analysis of a broader array of objects from the colonial world. After the crisis of colonial discourse and literature as central frameworks used to conceive and define the colonial period in Latin America and the Caribbean as a category of analysis, studies on the materialities of the archive, as well as the relevance of cultural objects, urban and social structures such as monuments and architecture have become an emerging field. Some contributors revisit canonical texts to showcase a reading of colonialism as a material encounter (Albarrán), and others engage recent debates in archival studies to discuss and analyze the expansion of the colonial archives to include critical engagements with gendered, indigenous, Creole and Black subjects (Kirk, More, Villaseñor Black and Álvarez). Race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality—and their material expressions as culture-­ specific yet malleable structures—challenge the usual binary oppositions between colonizers and colonized subjects, or between European vs. American populations, and help to conceive colonial subjects through a matrix of inter-related categories that go beyond Spanish, criollo, indio, African, Asian, mestizo or mulatto. Another cluster of essays explores new interdisciplinary collaborations with the archaeological excavation of indigenous sites (Verdesio) or examinations of space in ports and missions (Meléndez, El Jaber). By capturing mobility as an embodied experience of colonial spaces and places, these essays also expose power paradigms and political and social reconfigurations. Continental, insular and archipelagic frameworks, as well as theories on race, diaspora, coerced and voluntary movements, borders, and utopia are also considered here in dialogue with geography. The fourth and last section of this volume is entitled “Language, translation and beyond” and examines language as one of the most important areas of contact and negotiation during the colonial period. Many of the colonial texts and archives that constitute the object of study of this field are either translations, transliterations or uneven combinations of distinct languages and communication systems. Access to and study of indigenous languages, as well as the presence, evolution, and transformation of African, Asian and European languages during the conquest and colonization process, will be the focus of this cluster of essays. This section includes contributions from scholars who conceptualize colonial translation broadly to trace the adaptation of dissemination of indigenous cosmovisions in Anglo-colonial narratives of the conquest of the Americas (Bauer), the complex entrance of Black and indigenous subjects into colonial textualities (Brewer-García and McDonough), and the legacies of colonial notions of gender, sexuality and sovereignty for contemporary Latin American imaginaries (Horswell, Legnani). This Routledge Companion to Colonial Caribbean and Latin American Studies offers a survey of some of the most exciting projects currently developing in this field. Several areas of engagement were not included in this volume, like essays on colonial studies from approaches closer to the natural sciences, political science, and philosophical thought. New tendencies have emerged after the compilation of essays took shape, like studies on the colonial sensorium—which includes theorizations of the colonial experience that engage the senses beyond the predominance of visual (Voigt 2018; van Deusen 2018; Kole de Peralta 2019; Brewer-García and Fromont 2020)—as well as comparative work on non-European forms of spirituality and comparative intra-Asian relationships in Latin America and the Caribbean during the early and late colonial periods (Tsang 2020) . We would like to see these exclusions not as limitations of this volume, but as a testament to the evolving nature of this field, that is in a constant process of transformation, growth and innovation. We hope that Colonial studies keeps developing and growing, while we aim to continue promoting investigations and projects that could allow us to better understand the complexities of coloniality while wishing for a future world without colonialism. 27

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias

Notes 1 The line of demarcation, according to the language of the Treaty, left room for interpretation since longitude had proven impossible to measure at sea (Elden 2013, 242). 2 He confuses San Juan de Puerto Rico and the name of Saona, the largest islet on the southeastern coast of Hispaniola visited by Columbus. Saona, named after Michel de Cuneo de Saona, appears in the anonymous Cantino Planisphere (1502), and well-known maps by Juan de la Cosa (1500), Nicolay de Caverio (c. 1504), and Martin Waldseemüller (1507). 3 Muñoz only published the first volume of his Historia del Nuevo Mundo (1793); however, the bulk of his documents were later published by Martín Fernández de Navarrete (1825–1844), and used by h ­ istorians Washington Irving (1828), William H. Prescott (1837), and Alexander von Humboldt (1892). 4 As Brian Gollnick (2014) writes, Henríquez Ureña conceptualizes literature as a “systematic cultural history which can be described as a form of humanist nationalism: nationalism in the sense of defining the particularity of Latin American culture vis-à-vis Europe and the USA” (211). 5 For more detailed study on the colonial and Latin American Baroque, see Lezama Lima 1957; Leonard 1959; Chiampi 2000; Beverley 1998, 2008; Theodoro 1992; Echeverría 1994; Moraña 1994, and Martínez-San Miguel 2010. 6 We use the term latinidad to refer to the wide array of people of Latin American and Caribbean origins that have become part of the Latinx community in the US.The term was originally coined by sociologist Félix Padilla (1985), but it has been embraced by several contemporary Latinx cultural critics, like Juana María Rodríguez (2003) and Ramón Rivera-Servera (2012), among others. 7 Martínez-San Miguel (2018b) has reviewed some of the most significant contributions for the study of a colonial period in Latinx studies. We summarize some of the insights she explores in more detail in this chapter. 8 In this section we summarize, revise and expand the description of and distinction between colonial, postcolonial and decolonial studies as developed by Martínez-San Miguel 2018a. 9 On dependency theory and internal colonialism, see Cardoso and Falettob 1979; Stavenhagen 1965; González-Casanova 1965, and Bolaños and Verdesio 2002.

Works cited Acosta, Leonardo. 1984. El barroco de Indias y otros ensayos. Havana: Casa de Las Américas. Adorno, Rolena. 1988. “Nuevas perspectivas en los estudios literarios coloniales hispanoamericanos.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 14 (28): 11–28. ———. 1993. “Reconsidering Colonial Discourse for Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spanish America.” Latin American Research Review 28 (3): 135–145. ———. 2000. Guaman Poma:Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2002.“Washington Irving’s Romantic Hispanism and Its Columbian Legacies.” In Spain in America: The Origins of Hispanism in the United States, edited by Richard Kagan, 49–105. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2011. Colonial Latin American Literature: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Adorno, Rolena, and Roberto González Echevarría. 2017. Breve historia de la literatura latinoamericana colonial y moderna. Madrid: Editorial Verbum. Amador de los Ríos, Antonio. 1861–1865. Historia crítica de la literatura española. Madrid: Imprenta de José Rodríguez. Amauta. 1926–1930. First published in Lima. Available at: Digital Collections of the Ibero-American Institute. https://digital.iai.spk-berlin.de/viewer/toc/812949153/0/LOG_0000/. Anderson Imbert, Enrique [1954)] 1965. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. 1. La Colonia, Cien años de República. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. ———. 1969. Spanish-American Literature: A History. Detroit, MI: Wayne Books. Anderson Imbert, Enrique and Eugenio Florit. 1960. Literatura hispanoamericana: Antología e introducción histórica. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Andrade, Oswald de. (1928, 1991).“Cannibalist Manifesto.”  Translated by Leslie Bary. Latin American Literary Review 19 (38): 38–47. Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands/La frontera. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute. Arenal, Electa, and Schlau, Stacy, eds. 2010. Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works. Translations by Amanda Powell. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

28

Between colonialism and coloniality Arias, Santa. 2015. “Reconstituting the Archive: The Ancient Indigenous World.” In Cambridge History of Latin American Women’s Literature, edited by Ileana Rodríguez and Mónica Szurmuk, 11–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2017. “Sotero Figueroa.” In Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography, edited by Franklin Knight and Henry Louis Gates, 25–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Arias, Santa, and Mariselle Meléndez. 2002. Mapping Colonial Spanish America: Places and Commonplaces of Identity, Culture, and Experience. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Armitage, David. 1992. “Christopher Columbus and the Uses of History.” History Today 42 (5): 50–55. Armitage, David, Alison Bashford, and Sujit Sivasundaram, eds. 2017. Oceanic Histories. Cambridge Oceanic Histories. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. 1995. “Postmodernism and Postcolonialism.” In The Postcolonial Studies Reader, edited by Ashcroft, Bill Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin 117–118. London: Routledge. Asúa, Miguel de. 2014. Science in the Vanished Arcadia: Knowledge of Nature in the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay and Río de la Plata. Leiden: Brill. Bal, Mieke. 2002. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Balbuena Briones, Ángel. 1952. Literatura hispanoamericana. Barcelona: G. Gili. Bastian, Jeanette Allis. 2003. Owning Memory: How a Caribbean Community Lost Its Archives and Found Its History. Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited. Bauer, Ralph. 2003a. “Notes on the Comparative Study of the Colonial Americas: Further Reflections on the Tucson Summit.” Early American Literature 38 (2): 281–304. ———. 2003b. The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire,Travel, Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010. “Early American Literature and American Literary History at the ‘Hemispheric Turn’.” American Literary History 22 (2): 250–265. ———. 2019. The Alchemy of Conquest: Science, Religion, and the Secrets of the New World. University of Virginia Press. Bauer, Ralph, and José Mazzotti. 2009. Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities. Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg,Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press. Beckjord, Sarah. 2007. Territories of History. Humanism, Rhetoric, and the Historical Imagination in the Early Chronicles of Spanish America. State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Bellini, Giuseppe. 1985. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. Madrid: Castalia. Bello, Andrés. 1823. Biblioteca Americana o Miscelánea de Literatura, Artes i Ciencias. London: Imp. de G. Marchant. ———. 1826–27. El Repertorio Americano, 1826–1827. London: Barthés and Lowell Booksellers. Bennett, Herman. 2006. Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2009. Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2018. African Kings and Black Slaves: Sovereignty and Dispossession in the Early Modern Atlantic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Bentancor, Orlando. 2017. The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Bernabé, Jean, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Raphael Confiant. 1989. “Eloge de la créolité.” In Praise of Creoleness: édition bilingue français-anglais. Translated by M. B. Taleb-Khyar. Paris: Gallimard. Beverley, John. 1998. Una modernidad obsoleta: Estudios sobre el Barroco. Los Telques,VZ: ALEM. ———. 1999. Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2008. Essays on the Literary Baroque in Spain and Spanish America. Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Tamesis. Bhabha, Homi. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Bigelow, Allison Margaret. 2020. Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History Culture: University of North Carolina Press. Blanco, John. 2009. Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in Nineteenth Century Philippines. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bleichmar, Daniela. 2012. Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

29

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias ———. 2017. Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Bolaños, Álvaro Félix, and Gustavo Verdesio, eds. 2002. Colonialism Past and Present. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bolton, Herbert. 1933. “The Epic of Greater America.” The American Historical Review 38 (3): 448–474. Boone, Elizabeth Hill. 2007. Cycles of Time and Meaning in the Mexican Books of Fate. Austin: University of Texas Press. Boone, Elizabeth Hill, and Walter Mignolo, eds. 2004. Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Brewer-García, Larissa. 2012.“Bodies,Texts, and Translators: Indigenous Breast Milk and the Jesuit Exclusion of Mestizos in Late Sixteenth-Century Peru.” Colonial Latin American Review 21 (3): 365–390. ———. 2019. “Hierarchy and Holiness in the Earliest Colonial Black Hagiographies: Alonso de Sandoval and His Sources.” William and Mary Quarterly 76 (3): 477–508. ———. 2020. Beyond Babel: Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brewer-García, Larissa, and Cécile Fromont. 2020. “Atlantic Sensorium: Slave Trade, Spirituality, and the Cross-Cultural Body.” Unpublished manuscript. Brian, Amber. 2016. Alva Ixtlilxochitl's Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico. Nashville, TN:Vanderbilt University Press. Brokaw, Galen. 2010. A History of the Khipu. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Matthew, and Gabriel Paquette. 2013. “Introduction: Between the Age of Atlantic Revolutions and the Age of Empire.” In Connections after Colonialism: Europe and Latin America in the 1820s, edited by Matthew Brown and Gabriel Paquette, 1–28. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Bruce-Novoa, Juan. 1990. “Naufragios en los mares de la significación: de La Relación de Cabeza de Vaca a la literatura chicana.” Plural 19 (5): 12–21. Campos, Haroldo de. 1989. O sequestro do barroco na formação da literatura brasileira: O caso de Gregório de Matos. Salvador: Fundação Casa de Jorge Amado. Candiani,Vera S. 2014. Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. 2001. How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cardoso, Fernando Henrique, and Enzo Faletto. 1979. Dependency and Development in Latin America. Translated by Marjory Mattingly Urquidi. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carpentier, Alejo. 1964. “Problemática de la actual novela latinoamericana.” In Tientos y diferencias, 7–39. Mexico City: UNAM. ———. (1975) 1981. “El barroco y lo real maravilloso.” Ateneo de Caracas, May 22, 1975. In La novela latinoamericana en vísperas de un nuevo siglo y otros ensayos, 123–135. Madrid: Siglo XXI. ———. 1981. La novela latinoamericana en vísperas de un nuevo siglo y otros ensayos. 1st ed. Mexico City: Siglo XXI. ———. 1982. Los pasos perdidos. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del 80. Carrera, Magali M. 2011. Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: Mapping Practices of Nineteenth-Century Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Casey, Edward S. 2002. Representing Place: Landscape Painting and Maps. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Castillo, Susan, and Ivy Schweitzer, eds. 2001. The Literatures of Colonial America: An Anthology. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Castro-Klaren, Sara, eds. 2008. A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Catelli, Laura. 2020. Arqueología del mestizaje. Colonialismo y racialización Ediciones Universidad de la Frontera. ———. 2012. “Pintores criollos, pinturas de casta y colonialimso interno: los discursos raciales de las agencias criollas en la España del período virreinal tardio.” Cuadernos del CILHA 13 (17): 146–174. Ceballos, Javier, Jeffrey Cole, and Nina Scott, eds. 1994. Coded Encounters: Writing, Gender, and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin America. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Césaire, Aimé. 1939. “Cahier d'un retour au pays natal,” Volontés 20 (August): 23–51. ———. (1955) 1972. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press. ———. 1969. Une tempête. Paris: Seuil.

30

Between colonialism and coloniality Chang-Rodríguez, Raquel. 1988. La apropiación del signo: tres cronistas indígenas del Perú. Tempe: Arizona State University, Center for Latin American Studies. ———. 1991. El discurso disidente: ensayos de literatura colonial peruana. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Fondo Editorial. Chang-Rodríguez, Raquel, and Malva E. Filer. 2017. Voces de Hispanoamérica: antología literaria. Boston: Cengage Learning. Charles, John. 2010. Allies at Odds: The Andean Church and Its Indigenous Agents, 1583–1671. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Cheyfitz, Eric, and Alex Harmon. 2018. “Translation and Colonialism.” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics, edited by Jonathan Evans and Fruela Fernández, 270–286. London: Routledge. Chiampi, Irlemar. 2000. Barroco y modernidad. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Clavijero, Francisco Javier. 1826. Historia antigua de Megico. Translated by José Joaquín de Mora. London: R. Ackermann Cornejo Polar, Antonio. 1993. “El discurso de la armonía imposible: (el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega: discurso y recepción social).” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 19 (38): 73–80. ———. 1994. Escribir en el aire. Ensayo sobre la heterogeneidad cultural en las literaturas andinas. Lima: Editorial Horizonte ———. 2002. “Mestizaje e hibridez: Los riesgos de las metáforas. Apuntes.” Revista Iberoamericana 68 (200): 867–870. Coronado, Raúl. 2013. A World not to Come: a History of Latino Writing and Print Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coronil, Fernando. 1996. “Beyond Occidentalism: Toward Nonimperial Geohistorical Categories.” Cultural Anthropology 11 (1): 52–87. ———. 2008. “Elephants in the Americas? Latin American Postcolonial Studies and Global Decolonization.” In Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, edited by Mabel Moraña, Enrique D. Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui, 396–416. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Curiel, Ochy. 2013. La nación heterosexual: análisis del discurso jurídico y el régimen heterosexual desde la ­antropología de la dominación. Bogota: Brecha Lésbica y en la Frontera. Cushman, Gregory T. 2015. “The Environmental Contexts of Guaman Poma: Interethnic Conflict over Forest Resources and Place in Huamanga, 1540–1600.” In Unlocking the Doors to the Worlds of Guaman Poma and His Nueva Corónica, edited by Rolena Adorno and Ivan Boserup, 87–140. Copenhagen: The Royal Library, Museum Tusculanum Press. Dean, Carolyn. 2010. A Culture of Stone: Inka Perspectives on Rock. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Degiovanni, Fernando. 2018. Vernacular Latin Americanisms: War, the Market, and the Making of a Discipline. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2019. Allegories of the Anthropocene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. del Valle, Ivonne. 2009a. Escribiendo desde los márgenes: colonialismo y jesuitas en el siglo XVIII. Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores. ———. 2009b. “On Shaky Ground: Hydraulics, State Formation, and Colonialism in Sixteenth-Century Mexico.” Hispanic Review 77: (2) 197–220 Delbourgo, James, and Nicholas Dew, eds. 2008. Science and Empire in the Atlantic World. New York: Routledge. Díaz, Mónica. 2017. Indigenous Writings from the Convent: Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in Colonial Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Díaz Balsera,Viviana. 2005. The Pyramid Under the Cross: Franciscan Discourses of Evangelization and the Nahua Christian Subject in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. ———. 2018. Guardians of Idolatry: Gods, Demons, and Priests in Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón’s Treatise on the Heathen Superstitions. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Dym, Jordana, and Karl Offen, eds. 2011. Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader: University of Chicago Press Eakin, Marshall. 2014. “Does Latin America Have a Common History?” Vanderbilt e-Journal of Luso-Hispanic Studies 1. https://doi.org/10.15695/vejlhs.v1i0.3179 Echeverría, Bolívar, ed. 1994. Modernidad, mestizaje cultural, ethos barroco. Mexico City: UNAM/El Equilibrista. Elden, Stuart. 2013. The Birth of Territory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. El Jaber, Loreley. 2011. Un país malsano: la conquista del espacio en las crónicas del Río de la Plata: Siglos XVI y XVII. Rosario, AR: Beatriz Viterbo Editora.

31

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias Enjuto Rangel, Cecilia, Sebastiaan Faber, Pedro García-Caro, and Robert Patrick Newcomb, eds. 2019. Transatlantic Studies: Latin America, Iberia, and Africa. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Fabian, Johannes. 1986. Language and Colonial Power. Berkeley: University of California Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1952. Peau noir, masques blancs. Paris: Seuil. ———. 2008. Black Skin,White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press. Feliciano-Santos, Sherina. 2017a. “Prophetic Repairs: Narrative and Social Action among Puerto Rican Taíno.” Language and Communication 56: 19–32, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2017.03.001 ———. 2017b. “How do you Speak Taíno? Indigenous Activism and Linguistic Practices in Puerto Rico” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 27 (1): 4–21, 10.1111/jola.12139 ———. 2021. A Contested Caribbean Indigeneity. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Fernández, James. 1994. “The Bonds of Patrimony: Cervantes and the New World.” PMLA 109 (5): 969–981. Fernández Retamar, Roberto. 1971. Calibán: apuntes sobre la cultura en nuestra América. Mexico City: Ed. Diogenes. ———. 1989. Caliban and Other Essays. Translated by Edward Baker with a foreword by Frederic Jameson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Figueroa, Sotero. (1892) 1977. La verdad de la historia. San Juan: Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña. Figueroa, Yomaira. 2020. Decolonial Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literatures. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. ———. 2016. “Duelo de Teorías/Theory Duel?: Post(De)Colonial Theories in Relation.” Paper presented at the Annual Latin American Studies Association Conference, New York, May 27–30. Franco, Jean. 1969. Spanish American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1975a. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. Barcelona: Ariel. ———. 1975b. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana: a partir de la independencia. Barcelona: Ariel Fuchs, Barbara. 2003. Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2013. The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Fuentes, Marisa. 2018. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania. Funes Monzote, Reinaldo. 2009. From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History since 1492. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Galeano, Eduardo. 1992. We Say No: Chronicles, 1963/91. Translated by Mark Fried. New York: W. W. Norton. García Peña, Lorgia. 2016. The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2019. “Afro-Latinidad: From Arthur Schomburg to Cardi B.” Keynote Presentation 4th Biennial U.S. Latinx Literary Theory and Criticism Conference, “Transamerican Reticulations: Towards a Latinx Theory of Hemispheric Literatures,” John Jay College, New York, NY, April 25th. Gerassi-Navarro, Nina and Eyda Merediz, eds. 2009. “Otros estudios transatlánticos. Lecturas desde lo latinoamericano,” Special Issue. Revista Iberoamericana 75 (228): 605–626. Gil y Zárate, Antonio. 1844. Manual de literatura. Paris: Garnier. Gilroy, Paul. 1995. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Glissant, Édouard. 1990. Poétique de la relation. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1997a. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 1997b. Traité du Tout-Monde. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1999. Caribbean Discourse. Selected Essays. Translated by J. Michael Dash. Charlottesville: University Press of V   irginia. Goic, Cedomil. 1988. Historia y crítica de la literatura hispanoamericana. Barcelona: Crítica. Goldmark, Matthew. 2015. “Reading Habits: Catalina de Erauso and the Subjects of Early Modern Spanish Gender and Sexuality.” Colonial Latin American Review 24(2): 215–235. ———. October 2017. “Colonial Waters.” Arts of the Present Annual Meeting, University of California, Berkeley. ———. November, 2019. “Deporting the Ghost: La Llorona and the Making of a ‘Crisis,’” Gender & Sexuality Interdisciplinary Program. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee. Gollnick, Brian. 2014. “Approaches to Latin American Literature.” In The Companion to Latin American Studies, edited by Philip Swanson, 110–135. London: Routledge.

32

Between colonialism and coloniality González, Juan. 2000. Harvest of Empire. A History of Latinos in America. New York:Viking. González-Casanova, Pablo. 1965. “Internal Colonialism and National Development.” Studies in Comparative International Development 1 (4): 27–37. González Echevarría, Roberto, and Enrique Pupo-Walker, eds. 1996. The Cambridge History of Latin American Literature.Vol. 1, Discovery and Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gónzalez-Stephan, Beatriz, and Lucia Costigan. 1992. Crítica y descolonización. El sujeto colonial en la cultura latinoamericana. Caracas: Biblioteca de la Academia Nacional de la Historia. Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. 1993. New World Encounters. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gruesz, Kirsten Silva. 2002. Ambassadors of Culture: the Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2018. “The Spanish Americas Introduction.” Early American Literature 53 (3): 641-–664. Gruzinski, Serge. 1988. La colonisation de l’imaginaire: societés indigènes et occidentalisation dans le Mexique espagnol, XVIe-XVIIe siècle. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2002. “The Ashes of Desire: Homosexuality in Mid-Seventeenth-Century New Spain.” In Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America, edited by Peter Sigal, 197–214. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gudynas, Eduardo. 2011. “Buen Vivir: Today’s Tomorrow.” Development 54 (4): 441–447. Guha, Ranajit, Partha Chatterjee, and Pradeep Jeganathan. 1983. Subaltern Studies. New York: Oxford University Press. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “When Was the Postcolonial?: Thinking at the Limit.” In The Postcolonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, edited by Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti, 242–260. London: Routledge. Hamilton, Carlos. 1960. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. 1. Colonial y Siglo XIX. New York: Las Americas Publishing Company. Hanke, Lewis. 1964. Do the Americas Have a Common History? A Critique of the Bolton Theory. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Harley, J. B. 1990. Maps and the Columbian Encounter: An Interpretive Guide to the Travelling Exhibition, American Geographical Society Collection, Milwaukee. Milwaukee: Golda Meir Library, University of Wisconsin. ———. 2001. The New Nature of Maps: Essays in the History of Cartography. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hart, Jonathan. 2008. “Las Casas in French and other Languages.” In Approaches to Teaching the Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas, edited by Santa Arias and Eyda Merediz. New York: Modern Languages Association of America. Henríquez Ureña, Pedro. 1945. Literary Currents in Hispanic America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Higgins, Antony. 2000. Constructing the Criollo Archive: Subjects of Knowledge in the Bibliotheca Mexicana and the Rusticatio Mexicana. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Hill, Ruth. 2000. Sceptres and Sciences in the Spains: Four Humanists and the New Philosophy (ca. 1680–1740). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. ———. 2007. “Between Black and White: A Critical Race Theory Approach to Caste Poetry in the Spanish New World.” Comparative Literature 59 (4): 269–293. Hoffnung-Garskof, Jesse. 2019. Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hooker, Juliet. 2017. Theorizing Race in the Americas. Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Horswell, Michael. 2006. Decolonizing the Sodomite: Queer Tropes of Sexuality in Colonial Andean Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hulme, Peter. 1992. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797. London: Methuen. ———. 2016. “Calibán: Roberto Fernández Retamar’s American Intelligence.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 20.3 (51): 115–122. Humboldt, Alexander von. 1892. Cristóbal Colón y el descubrimiento de América: Historia de la geografía del nuevo continente y de los progresos de la astronomía naútica en los siglos XV y XVI. Translated by Luis Navarro y Calvo. Madrid: Librería Vda. de Hernando. Irving, Washington. 1828. A History of the Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus. London: J. Murray. Irwin, Robert McKee, and Mónica Szurmuk, eds. 2009. Diccionario de estudios culturales latinoamericanos. Mexico City: Siglo XXI.

33

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias ———. 2012. Dictionary of Latin American Cultural Studies. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Jackson, Shona. 2012. Creole Indigeneity. Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jacquot, Oliver. November 11, 2019. “Manuscritos mexicanos perdidos y recuperados.” Amoxcalli. https:// amoxcalli.hypotheses.org/10673 Jaksić, Ivan, ed. 1999. The Selected Writings of Andrés Bello.Translated by Frances M. López-Morillas. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2006. Andrés Bello. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Julie Greer. 2014. Satire in Colonial Spanish America: Turning the New World Upside Down. Austin: University of Texas Press. Kagan, Richard L. ed. 2002. Spain in America:The Origins of Hispanism in the United States. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kagan, Richard L. 2019. The Spanish Craze:America’s Fascination with the Hispanic World, 1779–1939. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Kanellos, Nicolás, and Helvetia Martell. 2000. Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Series: Hispanic Periodicals in the United States, Origins to 1960: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography. Houston, TX: Arte Publico Press. Kanellos, Nicolás, Kenya Dworkin y Méndez, and Alejandra Balestra. 2002. Herencia: The Anthology of Hispanic Literature of the United States. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kirk, Stephanie, and Sarah Rivett, eds. 2014. Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Klor de Alva, Jorge. 1995. “The Postcolonization of the (Latin) American Experience: A Reconsideration of ‘Colonialism,’ ‘Postcolonialsim,’ and ‘Mestizaje’.” In After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, edited by Gyan Prakash, 241–276. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kole de Peralta, Kathleen. 2019. “Mal Olor and Colonial Latin American History: Smellscapes in Lima, Peru, 1535–1614.” Hispanic American Historical Review 99. 1: 1–30. Kontler, László, Antonella Romano, Silvia Sebastiani, and Borbála Zsuzsanna Török, eds. 2014. Negotiating Knowledge in Early Modern Empires: A Decentered View. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kubayanda, Josaphat. 1990. “On Colonial/Imperial Discourse and Contemporary Critical Theory.” 1992 Latin American Studies Lecture Series, 10. College Park: University of Maryland. Latin American Subaltern Studies Group. 1993. “Founding Statement.” Boundary 2 20 (3): 110–121. Lattuca, Lisa R. 2001. Creating Interdisciplinarity. Nashville, TN:Vanderbilt University Press. Lavrin, Asunción. 2008. Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lazo, Raimundo. 1965. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana: el periodo colonial (1492–1780). Mexico, DF: Editorial Porrúa. Lazo, Rodrigo. 2016. “Introduction: Historical Latinidades and Archival Encounters.” In The Latino Nineteenth Century, edited by Rodrigo Lazo and Jesse Alemán, 1–19. New York: NYU Press. Leal, Luis. 1971. Breve historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. New York: Knopf. ———. 1979. “Mexican American Literature: A Historical Perspective.” In Modern Chicano Writers: A Collection of Essays, edited by Joseph Sommers and Tomás Ybarra Frausto, 18–30. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. León Llerena, Laura. 2011. “Historia, lenguaje y narración en el manuscrito de Huarochirí,” PhD diss., Princeton University. León Portilla, Miguel. 1962. The Broken Spears:The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico. Boston: Beacon. Leonard, Irving. 1959. Baroque Times in Old Mexico: Seventeenth-Century Persons, Places, and Practices. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Levy, Evonne, and Kenneth Mills, eds. 2013. Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque: Transatlantic Exchange and Transformation, Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press. Lezama Lima, José. 1957. La expresión americana. Havana: Instituto Nacional De Cultura Lima, Lázaro. 2007. The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory. New York: New York University Press. Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. 1846. Outre-Mer: Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea, 2nd ed. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. ———. 1966-82. Letters of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, edited by Andrew Hilen, 6 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

34

Between colonialism and coloniality López, Kathleen. 2013. Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. López-Chávez, Celia. 2016. Epics of Empire and Frontier: Alonso de Ercilla and Gaspar de Villagrá as Spanish Colonial Chroniclers. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. López Baralt, Mercedes. 1988. Icono y conquista: Guamán Poma de Ayala. Madrid: Hiperión. ———. 1993. Guamán Poma, autor y artista. Lima. Lima: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Fondo Editorial. López-Calvo, Ignacio. 2009. Imaging the Chinese in Cuban Literature and Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Lugones, María. 2007. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22 (1): 186–209. ———. 2008. “The Coloniality of Gender.” Worlds & Knowledges Otherwise 2 (Spring): 1–17. ———. 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 25 (4): 742–759. Madrigal, Luis Iñigo. 1982. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana Madrid: Cátedra Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2006. “Pensamento crítico desde a subalteridade: os Estudos Etnicos como ciências descoloniais ou para a transformação das humanidades e das ciências sociais no século XXI.” Afro-Asia 34: 105–129. ———. 2016. “Colonialism, Necolonialism, Internal Colonialism, The Postcolonial, Coloniality and Decoloniality.” In Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought, edited by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, and Marisa Belausteguigoitia, 67–78. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2017. “The Decolonial Turn.” New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power, edited by Juan Poblete, 111–127. London: Routledge. Martí, José. January 10, 1891. “Nuestra América.” La Revista Ilustrada. New York Martínez, María Elena. 2008. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Martínez-San Miguel,Yolanda. 2010. “(Neo) Barrocos de Indias: Sor Juana y los imaginarios coloniales de la crítica latinoamericana.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos. Special Issue on Sor Juana, edited by Stephanie Kirk. 44 (2): 433–463. ———. 2011.“Taíno Warriors?: Strategies for Recovering IndigenousVoices in Colonial and Contemporary Hispanic Caribbean Discourses.” Centro Journal 23 (Spring): 196–215. ———. 2014. Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-colonial Migrations in a Pan Caribbean Context. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. February 5, 2016. “Colonialismo y decolonialidad: literatura y debates disciplinarios.” 80 grados: Prensa sin prisa. http://www.80grados.net/colonialismo-y-decolonialidad-literatura-y-debatesdisciplinarios/ ———. 2018a. “Resistances in Caribbean Literature (1930s to the present).” In The Routledge History of Latin American Culture, edited by Carlos Manuel Salomon, 94–114. New York: Routledge. ———. 2018b. “Rethinking the Colonial Latinx Literary Imaginary: A Comparative and Decolonial Research Agenda.” In Cambridge History of Latina/o American Literature, edited by John Morán González and Laura Lomas, 93–118. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda, Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, and Marisa Belausteguigoitia, eds. 2016. Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought: Historical and Institutional Trajectories. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mazzotti, José Antonio, ed. 2000. Agencias criollas: La ambigüedad “colonial” en las letras hispanoamericanas. Pittsburgh, PA: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. Biblioteca de América. Mazzotti, José Antonio. 2016. “Criollismo, Creole and Creolité.” In Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought Historical and Institutional Trajectories, edited by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Ben. Sifuentes Jáuregui and Marisa Belausteguigoitia, 87–99. New York: Palgrave. McDonough, Kelly. 2014. The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico.Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Melville, Elinor. 1997. A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino. 1911. Historia de la poesía hispano-americana. Madrid: Librería General de Victoriano Suárez. Mignolo, Walter. 1989. “Afterword: From Colonial Discourse to Colonial Semiosis.” Dispositio 14 (36–38): 333–337.

35

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias ———. 1993. “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse: Cultural Critique or Academic Colonialism?” Latin American Research Review 28 (3): 120–134. ———. 1995. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy,Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ———. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledge and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2009. “Coloniality: The Darker Side of Modernity.” In Modernologies. Contemporary Artists Researching Modernity and Modernism, edited by S. Breitwisser, 39–49. (Catalog of the Exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, Barcelona, Spain). (Fall). ———. 2013. “On Comparison: Who is Comparing What and Why.” In Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses, edited by Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, 99–119. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds. 1991. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Moraga, Cherríe and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. 1983. This Bridge Called my Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color. New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press. Morales, Ángel Luis. 1974. Introducción a la literatura hispanoamericana. Río Piedras, PR: Edil. Moraña, Mabel, ed. 1994. Relecturas del Barroco de Indias. Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte. Moraña, Mabel. 2005. Ideologies of Hispanism. Nashville, TN:Vanderbilt University Press. Moraña, Mabel, Enrique D. Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui. 2008. Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. More, Anna. 2013. Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Moses, Bernard. 1922. Spanish Colonial Literature in South America. New York: Hispanic Society of America. Mundy, Barbara E. 1996. The Mapping of New Spain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Muñoz, Juan Bautista. 1793. Historia del Nuevo Mundo. Madrid: por la Viuda de Ibarra Myers,  Kathleen Ann. 2003. Neither Saints Nor Sinners:Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Negrón-Muntaner, Frances. 2020. “Here is the Evidence: Notes on Arturo Alfonso Schomburg and AfroLatino Visuality.” African American Review, edited by Laura Helton and Rafia Zafa (Forthcoming) Nerlekar, Anjali. 2016. “Beyond National Bounds, the Indo Caribbean.” Paper presented at the Annual Latin American Studies Association Conference, New York, May 27–30. Nemser, Daniel. 2017. Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press. Neumann, Birgit, and Ansgar Nünning, eds. 2014. Travelling Concepts for the Study of Culture. Berlin: De Gruyter. Newton, Melanie. 2013. “Returns to a Native Land: Indigeneity and Decolonization in the Anglophone Caribbean.” Small Axe 17 (2): 108–122. Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: University of California Press. Orson, Diane. 2010. “Yale Returns Machu Picchu Artifacts To Peru.” National Public Radio, All Things Considered, December 15, 2010. https://www.npr.org/2010/12/15/132083890/yale-returns-machupicchu-artifacts-to-peru Ortiz, Fernando. 1940. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y del azúcar. Havana: Jesús Montero Editor. ———. (1947) 1970. Cuban Counterpoint: Tabacco and Sugar. Translated by Harriet de Onís. New York: Vintage Books. Oviedo, José Miguel. 2001. Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Padilla, Felix M. 1985. Latino Ethnic Consciousness:The Case of Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Padrón, Ricardo. 2004. The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature and Empire in Early Modern Spain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2020. The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Palmié, Stephan, and Francisco A. Scarano, eds. 2011. The Caribbean, a History of the Region and Its People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. 2011. “Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes in Caribbean Literatures.” In Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, 99–116. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

36

Between colonialism and coloniality ———. 2014. “Extinctions: Chronicles of Vanishing Fauna in the Colonial and Postcolonial Caribbean.” In The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard, 341–360. New York: Oxford University Press. Parkinson Zamora, Lois. 2006. The Inordinate Eye: New World Baroque and Latin American Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Paz, Octavio. 1959. El laberinto de la soledad. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Pérez, Emma. 1999. The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Perlongher, Néstor. 1991. Caribe transplantino. Poesía neobarroca cubana y rioplatense. São Paulo: Editorial Illuminiras. Picón Salas, Mariano. 1944. De la conquista a la independencia: tres siglos de historia cultural. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Pirotto, Armando D. 1937. La literatura en América: el coloniaje. Buenos Aires: Sociedad del Libro Rioplatense. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes:Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Poblete, Juan, ed. 2003. Critical Latin American and Latino Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Poblete, Juan. 2018. New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power. London: Routledge. Prescott, William H. 1837. History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic. Philadelphia: David McKay. ——— 1843. History of the Conquest of Mexico:With a Preliminary View of the Ancient Mexican Civilization and the Life of the Conqueror Hernando Cortés. New York: Harpers and Brothers. Pupo-Walker, Enrique. 1982. La vocación literaria del pensamiento histórico en América. Madrid: Gredos. Puri, Shalini. 2004. The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Ethnocentrism, and Latin America.” NEPLANTA 1 (3): 533–580. Quintana, Benito. 2010. “Damas indias: America’s Iconic Body and the Wars of Conquest in the Spanish Comedia.” Bulletin of the Comediantes, 62 (1): 103–122. Quiroga, José. 2000. Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America. New York: New York University Press. Quispe-Agnoli, Rocío. 2017. “The Indigenous Sacred as Evil Otherness in Early Colonial Andes.” In To Be Indio in Colonial Spanish America, edited by Mónica Díaz, 191–216. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Rabasa, José. 2000. “Reading Cabeza de Vaca, or How We Perpetuate the Culture of Conquest.” In Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier. The Historiography of Sixteenth- Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest, 31–83. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rabasa, José, Javier Sanjinés, and Robert Carr, eds. 1994. “Subaltern Studies in the Americas.” Special Issue, Dispositio 19 (46). ———. 2016. Motherless Tongues: The Insurgency of Language amid Wars of Translation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rafael,Vicente, L. 1993. Contracting Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rama, Ángel. 1982. Transculturación narrativa en América Latina. Mexico City: Siglo XXI ———. 1984. La ciudad letrada. Hanover, NH: Ediciones Norte. Reinhartz, Dennis, and Gerald D. Saxon, eds. 2005. Mapping and Empire: Soldier Engineers on the Southwestern Frontier. Austin: University of Texas Press. Resina, Joan Ramon. 2005. “Whose Hispanism? Cultural Trauma, Disciplined Memory and Symbolic Dominance.” In Moraña 2005, 160–186. Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana. 1996. Special issue, “Las poéticas coloniales y el origen del pensamiento teórico-crítico en Hispanoamérica,” 43–44. Río, Ángel del. 1948. Historia de la literatura española. New York: The Dryden Press. Ríos-Font, Wadda C. 2005. “National Literature in the Protean Nation: The Question of NineteenthCentury Spanish Literary History.” In Spain Beyond Spain: Modernity, Literary History, and National Identity, edited by Brad Epps and Luis Fernández Cifuentes, 127–147. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Rivera-Servera, Ramón H. 2012. Performing Queer Latinidad: Dance, Sexuality, Politics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Robinson, Douglas. 2014. Translation and Empire. London: Routledge.

37

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel and Santa Arias Rodó, José Enrique. 1900. Ariel.Valencia, SP: Prometeo. Rodríguez, Ileana, eds. 2001. The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rodríguez, Ileana, and Josebe Martínez, eds. 2011. Estudios transatlánticos postcoloniales, 3 vols. Rubí (Barcelona): Anthropos. Rodríguez, Juana María. 2003. Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces. New York: NYU Press. Roggiano, Alfredo. 1978. “Acerca de dos barrocos: el de España y el de América.” In El barroco en América, 39–47,Vol. I. XVII Congreso del Instituto Internacional de Literatura iberoamericana. Madrid: Cultura Hispánica. ———. 1994. “Para una teoría del barroco hispanoamericano.” In Relecturas del Barroco de Indias, edited by Mabel Moraña, 1–15. Hanover, CO: Ediciones del Norte. Ross, Kathleen. 1993. The Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Siguënza y Góngora: A New World Paradise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Safier, Neil. 2012. Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York:Vintage Books. Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina. 2016. Indian Given: Racial Geographies across Mexico and the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Salomon, Frank. 2004. The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Salvatore, Ricardo. 2016. Disciplinary Conquest: U.S. Scholars in South America, 1900–1945. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sampedro, Benita. 2019. “Transiting Western Sahara.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 20 (1–2): 17–38. Sandoval, Chela. 2000. Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Sánchez-González, Lisa. 2001. Boricua Literature: A Literary History of the Puerto Rican Diaspora. New York: New York University Press. Sarduy, Severo. 1972a.“El barroco y neobarroco.” In América Latina en su literatura, edited by César Fernández Moreno, 167–184. Mexico City: UNESCO/Siglo XXI Editores. ———. 1972b. Barroco. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. 2006. The Conquest of History: Spanish Colonialism and National Histories in the Nineteenth Century. Pittsburgh, PA.: University of Pittsburgh Press. Scott, Heidi. 2009. Contested Territory: Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Seed, Patricia. 1991. “Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse.” Latin American Research Review 26 (3): 181–200. ———. 1994. “Subaltern Studies in the Post-Colonial Americas.” Dispositio 19 (46): 217–228. Silverblatt, Irene. 1995. “Becoming Indian in the Central Andes of Seventeenth-Century Peru.” After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, edited by Gyan Prakash, 279–298. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Simon, Joshua. 2017. The Ideology of Creole Revolution: Imperialism and Independence in American and Latin American Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988a. Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge. ———. 1988b. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. London: Macmillan Education. Stavans, IIán, and Lalo Alcaraz. 2000. Latino U.S.A.: A Cartoon History. New York: Basic Books. Stavenhagen, Rodolfo. 1965. “Classes, Colonialism and Acculturation,” Studies in Comparative International Development 1(6): 53–77. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Scene. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stolley, Karen. 2013. Domesticating Empire: Enlightenment in Spanish America. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Téllez, Jorge. 2012. Poéticas del Nuevo Mundo. Articulación del pensamiento poético en América Colonial: Siglos XVI, XVII y XVIII. Siglo XXI Editores. Theodoro, Janice. 1992. América Barroca: tema e variações. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira.

38

Between colonialism and coloniality Thompson, Lanny. 2010. Imperial Archipelago: Representation ad Rule in the Insular Territories Under U.S. Dominion after 1898. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. Ticknor, George. 1849. History of Spanish Literature, 3 volumes. London: Murray. Torres-Saillant, Silvio. 1997. Caribbean Poetics: Toward and Aesthetic of West Indian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2006. An Intellectual History of the Caribbean. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Tortorici, Zeb. 2018. Sins Against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tsang, Martin. February 14, 2020. “The Cane and the Cowrie: The Development and Negotiation of an Afro-Asian Religious Diaspora in Cuba, 1847–1900” Undercurrents: Connection and Rupture in the Caribbean, from the Pre-Columbian Era to 1900. University of Miami. Ugarte, Manuel. 1920. El porvenir de la América española: La raza, la integridad territorial y moral, la organización interior.Valencia: Prometeo. Valdés, Mario J., and Djelal Kadir, eds. 2004. Literary Cultures of Latin America: A Comparative History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Valdés,Vanessa K. 2017. Diasporic Blackness:The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg. New York: SUNY Press. Valdeón, Roberto A. 2014. Translation and the Spanish Empire in the Americas. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. van Deusen, Nancy. 2018. Embodying the Sacred.Women Mystics in Seventeenth-Century Lima. Durham: Duke University Press. Verdesio, Gustavo. 2002. “Colonialism Now and Then: Colonial Latin American Studies in the Light of the Predicament of Latin Americanism.” In Colonialism Past and Present, edited by Alvaro Félix Bolaños and Gustavo Verdesio, 1–17. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———, ed. 2005. “Latin American Subaltern Studies Revisited,” Special issue of Dispositio 25 (52). ———. 2010a. “El drama de la restitución de restos humanos y sus actores en Uruguay y Argentina: El Estado, los/las arqueólogos/as y las comunidades de Pueblos Originarios.” In El regreso de los muertos y las promesas de oro: Usos y significados de la cultura indígena, edited by Carina Jofre, 123–139. Catamarca, AR: Universidad de Catamarca. ———. 2010b.“Invisible at a Glance: Indigenous Cultures of the Past, Ruins, Archaeological Sites, and Our Regimes of Visibility.” In Ruins of Modernity, edited by Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle, 339–353. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Vidal, Hernán. 1993. “The Concept of Colonial and Postcolonial Discourse: A Perspective from Literary Criticism.” Latin American Research Review 28 (3): 113–119. Villaseñor Black, Charlene. 2006. Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Voigt, Lisa. 2009. Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture/University of North Carolina Press. ———. 2016. Spectacular Wealth:The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2018. “Festive Soundscapes in Colonial Potosí and Minas Gerais.” In Beyond Sight: Engaging the Senses in Iberian Literatures and Cultures, 1200–1750, edited by Ryan D. Giles and Steven Wagschal, 243–262. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Wachtel, Nathan. 1977. The Vision of the Vanquished:The Spanish Conquest of Peru Through Indian Eyes, 1530– 1570. Hassocks, Sussex, UK: Harvester Press. Williams, Patrick. 1999. “Frantz Fanon:The Routes of Writing.” In An Introduction to Caribbean Francophone Writing: Guadeloupe and Martinique, edited by Sam Haigh, 51–68. New York: Berg. Winsor, Justin. 1884. Narrative and Critical History of America. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin. Wynter, Sylvia. 1970. “Jonkonnu in Jamaica: Towards the Interpretation of Folk Dance as a Cultural Process.” Jamaica Journal 4 (2): 34–48. ———. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom. Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” The New Centennial Review 3 (Fall): 257–337. Yannakakis,Yanna. 2014. “Making Law Intelligible: Networks of Translation in Mid-Colonial Oaxaca.” In Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes, edited by Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis, 79–106. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zavala, Iris M., and Francisco Rico. 1994. Historia y crítica de la literatura española. Barcelona: Crítica.

39

PART I

Colonialism and coloniality

1 RACE AND DOMINATION IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN STUDIES Daniel Nemser

In the last two decades, race has emerged as a major topic in the field of colonial Latin American studies. By my count, nearly twenty monographs and ten edited volumes addressing the question of race during the early modern/colonial period in part or in full have appeared since the publication of R. Douglas Cope’s The Limits of Racial Domination in 1994.1 While the discipline of history accounts for most of these titles, anthropology, history of art, and literary/cultural studies are represented as well, and it is clear that these scholars see themselves as participating in a broad, interdisciplinary dialogue. Pushing back against earlier scholarship that took for granted the transparency, stability, and transhistorical character of racial classification in the Iberian empires, these studies have aimed to historicize the meaning of difference and the contours of identity prior to the emergence of the “scientific” approach to race in the nineteenth century. Using rich empirical analysis, they have demonstrated convincingly that colonial formations of difference drew not only on phenotype but also on other kinds of attributes, including ancestry, culture, language, occupation, religion, and social status. Furthermore, this new historiography has emphasized the capacity of subaltern subjects to contest, negotiate, evade, and resist the imposition of racial categories by colonial authorities. The Iberian empires also show up in a very different set of scholarship on race. Contemporary race theorists often mention this case as a starting point for exploring the emergence of “modern” ideas of race, but this treatment commonly occurs in passing—a reference to limpieza de sangre here, a name check of Bartolomé de las Casas there. In their influential work on racial formation in the United States, for example, the sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant trace the emergence of modern notions of race back to the conquest of the Americas. “It was only when European explorers reached the Western Hemisphere ... that the distinctions and categorizations fundamental to a racialized social structure, and to a discourse of race, began to appear” (1994, 61). In a short section on the history of racial formation, they reference Las Casas in an endnote and label the conquest “the first ... racial formation project” (1994, 182–183, n19; 62). But here as in most of these studies, there is little sustained engagement and these Iberian and Latin American foundations quickly drop away. In general, then, these lines of scholarly inquiry—the historiographical and the theoretical— have failed to intersect.2 This is not to say that historical studies do not consider race at a conceptual level, or that they never cite critical scholarship on race, but that this engagement is limited.We might say that the role of race theory in the historiographical paradigm is analogous 43

Daniel Nemser

to that of Las Casas in the theoretical paradigm. This missed encounter may be related to disciplinary differences, or perhaps, as I discuss below, the temporal demarcation of colonial studies has made specialists reluctant to draw on contemporary theoretical work that they deem anachronistic. Whatever the explanation, it is worth taking a step back and thinking through the implications of the assumptions we make when we talk about race in colonial Latin America. Although today it is a commonplace to call race a social construction, the historian Thomas Holt observes that academics are quick to “fall back into the older habits of thought” without “prob[ing] beyond the mantra of social constructedness, to ask what it really might mean in shaping lived experience” (2000, 10). In this light, I suggest that the field of colonial studies would benefit from engaging more substantively with race theory. Specifically, such engagement might help to highlight, reframe, and address certain conceptual problems that arise from how the field has tended to understand race. In this chapter, I sketch out three of these conceptual problems and identify their implications. The first has to do with the periodization of race and the problem of anachronism; the second with the privileging of agency over domination; and the third with the concept of mestizaje (racial/cultural mixture) and the demographic causality it often implies. Next, I attempt to model the sort of theoretically engaged analysis I am proposing by considering the racialization of the “Indian” in the Jesuit José de Acosta’s De procuranda indorum salute (1588), an influential missionary treatise that marks a significant turning point in the colonial project. Finally, I suggest that contemporary race theory would also benefit from grappling with the conceptual implications of recent scholarship on colonial Latin America. Before moving on, I want to outline some of the key concepts that inform my analysis here. As a social construction, race is not a “natural” category rooted in bodies or populations, nor is it reducible to some prior or preexisting (and therefore more “authentic” or “objective”) identity. Race has a history, or many histories—it has come into existence at particular moments and in particular places, and has endured but also changed over time. Precisely because the “parasitic and chameleonlike qualities” of race make it difficult to define, Holt suggests that “we might do better not to try to define or catalogue [its] content” but to focus instead on “what work race does” (2000, 27). This “work” is inseparable from techniques of domination, the production and distribution of violence and vulnerability, and the extraction and accumulation of capital. In other words, race exceeds ideas and discourse—it has a social reality that over time becomes sedimented in bodies and populations, institutions and practices, architectures and infrastructures. Race is material, then, not because of the biological character or attributes of particular bodies but because of “the bundle of ascriptive and punitive procedures” through which it is made to materialize (Chen 2013, 206). Race is constituted through and made visible in political contention over the distribution of social surplus (Omi and Winant 1994), differential legal status and colonial zones of exception (Mbembe 2003), economic subordination, forced labor, and uneven access to the wage (Wallerstein 1983; Quijano 2000), infrastructures and the organization of space (Nemser 2017), and state-sponsored and extralegal violence and vulnerability to premature death (Gilmore 2007; Chen 2013; Singh 2017). This means that race is an effect rather than a cause, an end product rather than a starting point. As the critic Chris Chen explains, “race” has no “independent causal properties” but is instead the “consequence ... of racial ascription or racialization processes which justify asymmetrical power relationships through reference to phenotypical characteristics and ancestry” (2013, 207). Although from the perspective of colonial Latin America I would broaden the set of relevant “stigmata of otherness” (Balibar 1991, 18), this insight has important methodological implications. It suggests that as critics we begin not with racial doctrines, or the ideas and discourses that cohere around the identification of difference, but with racializing practices, or the sociohistorical processes that produce and 44

Race and domination in colonial Latin American studies

reproduce race as such—which means starting from domination rather than difference (Chen 2013; Wolfe 2016).3 Finally, this methodological shift means provisionally foregrounding the concept of race over identity, by which I mean focusing on the product of external processes of ascription over internal acts of self and group identification. It is impossible, of course, to disentangle these categories entirely, since structure and agency are mutually constitutive. Every racialization process will be incomplete, and every identity will be constrained by structural limitations (Fisher and O’Hara 2009). But the same is true of critical approaches to race—as the medievalist David Nirenberg insists, “any history of race will be at best limited, strategic, and polemical” and as such these histories ought to be read as “provocations to comparison” (2007, 86–87). This distinction between race and identity is strategic, leaning more heavily on structure than agency in order to place the category of domination at the center of my analysis of racialization.4

Periodization In many ways, colonial Latin America offers an ideal point of entry for the study of race and racialization. Many critics agree that race is a “modern” concept tied to European colonialism, which for the first time made possible the hierarchical classification of peoples on a global scale. This process began with Iberian expansion into Africa and the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.Yet the Iberian case is often relegated to a marginal position in the historiography of the transition to modernity.5 Whether seen in terms of the emergence of the state, the consolidation of capitalism, or the process of secularization and the rise of scientific knowledge, for example, modernity tends to be associated with northern Europe, while the Iberian monarchies are often relegated to the far side of this temporal break. These assumptions about Iberian “backwardness” are in many ways a product of the Black Legend, by which, beginning in the late sixteenth century, Spain’s European rivals mobilized narratives of its cruelty and superstition to justify their own imperial claims (Greer et al. 2007). Understandably, the marginality of the Iberian empires also shapes much of the new historiography of race in colonial Latin American studies.This is partly a question of temporality. Most definitions of race are associated with biology and focus on visible, bodily, and heritable markers like skin color. This scientific discourse of race emerged during the nineteenth century, hand in hand with Europe’s rapid imperial expansion into Asia, Africa, and the Pacific (Wade 2010, 8–10). In Latin America, however, this same period is characterized by the wars of independence against Spain and the formation of national states. In other words, it is precisely the moment at which the colonial period is ending in Latin America that the scientific discourse of race first begins to appear on the global scene. From this vantage point, it would be anachronistic to “apply” the concept of race in colonial Latin American studies.6 Scholars making this argument do not deny the existence of discrimination prior to the nineteenth century, but they frame this discrimination in nonracial terms. Although there is no consensus regarding appropriate language, some prefer to draw on colonial terminology like casta and calidad in an attempt to more accurately capture pre-Enlightenment understandings of difference. Others borrow alternative concepts from contemporary scholarship and discuss these classifications as “ethnic” or “socioracial.” Whichever concept is used, the reasoning is broadly consistent.What underlies these varied approaches is the notion of a form of difference based on characteristics that are cultural or religious and thus fluid rather than biological and fixed. In this way, early modern difference is detached from “true” race. What is at stake in the politics of anachronism? It makes sense that scholars in the field of colonial Latin American studies would carve out a spatial and temporal domain of expertise, 45

Daniel Nemser

insulated from the reach of non-specialists. And this expertise is important—as noted above, colonial studies has made a valuable contribution to the project of historicizing difference. But such fragmentation can also close down avenues of critical and comparative analysis. If casta, say, is not racial, if it is considered to be radically different, it can tell us little about the concept or history of race—all it can tell us is what race is not. Rather than opening up a rich dialogue on comparative racialization (Shih 2008)—tracking how racialization processes work and how the “races” they produce change over time and space—such an approach affirms a unitary, static, and limited understanding of race. Not only does this approach limit comparative analysis, it also poses problems for understanding race, racism, and racialization in contemporary contexts. If our concept of race is limited to its biological variant, it becomes difficult to conceptualize more recent formulations of racism. Scholars identify a radical “break” in the mid twentieth century, when transnational anti-racist and anti-colonial movements dismantled the dominant racial order of white supremacy (Winant 2001). Rather than disappear, however, racism was reconfigured and became what some have called “neo-racism,” “cultural racism,” and “racism without race” (Balibar 1991). If race continues to structure the world we inhabit today—and there can be little doubt that it does—then its operative forms are in fact more resonant with those of the early modern period than they are with that of the nineteenth century, which for its part comes to appear as an exception (Loomba 2002, 37–39; Nemser 2017, 10).

Domination As I noted at the outset, Cope’s study of colonial rule in seventeenth-century Mexico City, The Limits of Racial Domination (1994), marks a turning point in the historiography on race in colonial Latin America. One of the book’s most important interventions was to challenge the conventional understanding of Spanish colonial hegemony. Many historians believed that the small Spanish elite was able to hold power over the long term by using “racial ideology” to divide the Indian and Black populations and convince them of their own inferiority. But Cope found that social relations among Mexico City’s poor were far more complex, nuanced, and fluid than the rigidly hierarchical grid of the so-called sistema de castas could account for. “We should not assume that subordinate groups are passive recipients of elite ideology,” wrote Cope. “Elite attempts at racial or ethnic categorizations met with resistance as non-Spaniards pursued their own, often contradictory, ends: social mobility, group solidarity, self-definition” (1994, 4–5). Cope’s study has been widely influential in the field, particularly with regard to scholarship on race during the colonial period. Drawing on his work, scholars have foregrounded the ways in which non-Spaniards negotiated, contested, and resisted the imposition of Spanish racial ideology, and explored the fluidity and flexibility of colonial identity. In other words, Cope’s work reinvigorated the study of difference in colonial Latin America by turning away from elite machinations and instead taking up the plebeian response. The turn to “popular notions of difference, and subaltern manipulations of elite ideology ... suggested promising new directions for a cultural analysis of what was beginning to look like an exhausted line of inquiry” (Fisher and O’Hara 2009, 12–13). Yet by investing so deeply in the recuperation of subaltern agency and resistance, this scholarship has at times lost track of the flip side of Cope’s argument. For Cope, the fact that “racial domination” had limits was not intended as a denial of domination as such. At stake in his meticulous analysis was not the question of whether domination was effective—that went without saying—but of how domination was secured. What Cope’s work shows is simply that it was not the imposition of an elite ideology of racial hierarchy—the idea that “Mestizos” are both 46

Race and domination in colonial Latin American studies

different from and superior to “Mulattoes,” say, and thus that no feelings of solidarity ought to unite them—that served to stabilize the colonial order. Rather, it was primarily the social relations of production that performed this function. “Labor relations and patronage provided a far more effective divide-and-conquer strategy than did racial ideology” (1994, 7). For Cope, even the riot of 1692 in Mexico City, which came close to toppling the colonial order, underscored the limits not of colonial domination but of plebeian solidarity. “The structure of Hispanic domination,” he concludes, “could not be dismantled in a day” (1994, 160). A quarter-century after its publication, Cope’s work can help us recuperate the category of domination in colonial Latin American studies. With this distance, however, it is also worth highlighting the limits of his conceptualization of racial domination. For Cope, domination has to do primarily with the colonial state’s capacity to rule. Seen in this light, racial domination would describe a scenario in which members of Mexico City’s plebeian population understand themselves to be divided into a series of racial categories with divergent interests. These differences, consequently, serve as an obstacle to the formation of a unified front against their Spanish oppressors. Domination is “racial,” then, because difference serves instrumentally to divide the city’s poor against themselves and by doing so insulate the ruling classes from popular resistance. But there are other ways to understand domination in general, and racial domination in particular. Consider, for example, the argument about the function of race laid out by the sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois in his classic study Black Reconstruction in America ([1935] 1998). Discussing the failure of Reconstruction following the abolition of slavery in the United States and the return to racial segregation under Jim Crow, Du Bois showed how racial ideologies served to “dr[ive] ... a wedge between white and black workers” by fabricating a cross-class alliance between wealthy landowners and poor laborers on the basis of their purported whiteness. Yet Du Bois also pushed the argument an important step further, underscoring that their actions should be seen not as a sort of “false consciousness” but as rational, given that the alliance in fact conferred “a sort of public and psychological wage” and thus supported their material interests: They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white.They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule. On the other hand, in the same way, the Negro was subject to public insult; was afraid of mobs; was liable to the jibes of children and the unreasoning fears of white women; and was compelled almost continuously to submit to various badges of inferiority. (1998, 700–701) Du Bois’s formulation of the “divide and conquer” argument offers a more sophisticated analysis of racial domination precisely because he captures its heterogeneity. Here racial domination goes beyond effective political rule and extends to social and economic relations, institutional structures, and the symbolic and spatial orders more generally. Insofar as certain workers came to view themselves in terms of “whiteness,” racial domination is tangled up with the production of affects, 47

Daniel Nemser

habits, and subjectivities that, once materially constituted, are capable of naturalizing and reproducing themselves over time. Racial domination also manifests in state and extralegal violence— Du Bois’s comments on policing and lynch mobs resonate with the centrality of racialized violence in recent academic scholarship and social movements. In the context of colonial Latin America, we could read the construction of the “Indian” as a category defined by vulnerability and tributary status and the construction of the “Black” as a category defined by enslavability and subject to gratuitous violence as forms of racial domination. Returning to Cope serves as a valuable reminder of the importance of domination in colonial Latin American studies, while providing an opportunity to reflect on its multiple, interlocking and mutually constitutive modalities.

Mestizaje The history of race in Latin America has been difficult if not impossible to imagine without the concept of mestizaje. It is a notoriously slippery concept, and not only because it can refer ambiguously to racial and cultural mixture, or because it bleeds into other concepts like syncretism, transculturation, and hybridity. Mestizaje is also difficult to conceptualize because the very idea of “mixture” seems to presume that the subjects of mixing begin this process as “pure.” While apparently celebrating a sort of mixed-race or multicultural hybridity, then, the concept simultaneously hardens notions of racial purity, since every identification of “mixture” will produce retroactive “purities” as a result. Another difficulty with the concept of mestizaje has to do with a split regarding its proper object. Scholarship on mestizaje in Latin America tends to treat it either demographically, as an objective phenomenon manifesting in an “increasingly mixed” population, or politically, as an ideological discourse of power deployed as part of a state project to construct a national identity. While not mutually exclusive, there is a tension between these two frameworks, since the former presumes the demographic reality of racial mixture in the population while the latter presumes that the discourse of mestizaje is primarily ideological and at best only partially reflects a demographic reality. Given that the political approach centers on post-independence processes of state formation, moreover, it is not surprising that the demographic approach would predominate in scholarship on the colonial period. There is a similar tension between a theory of mestizaje that stresses its demographic objectivity on the one hand, and a theory of race that foregrounds its socially constructed character on the other.Yet these two frameworks often coexist uneasily in the scholarship on race in colonial Latin America. Even when critics are clear about race as a social construction, the concept of mestizaje often smuggles in a naturalized understanding of race, assuming that “the system of classifying ‘blood mixture’ arose because ‘race mixture’ occurred, an argument that reproduces the idea of races as biological givens” (Martínez 2008, 4). Similarly, many studies presume a historical arc in which the binary character of Spanish colonial society, spatially and institutionally segregated into a república de españoles and a república de indios, is undermined by the growth of a “Mestizo” or “mixed-race” population.The premise is that racial domination was limited not by subaltern agency or struggle but by its demographic composition. An early and influential example of this tendency is found in an essay on the spatial organization of colonial Mexico City published by the Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman in 1938. The essay analyzed the segregated, orthogonal grid on which the city was built, with the Spanish population living in the center or traza and the indigenous relegated to the outer districts or barrios. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, what O’Gorman called this “Principio de Separación” (Principle of Separation) no longer corresponded to reality, since “the mixture of races is a fact that is inevitably consummated, and in this way the urban system ... was 48

Race and domination in colonial Latin American studies

undermined and destroyed at its very foundation” (la mezcla de razas es un hecho consumado inevitablemente, con lo que el sistema urbano ... se vió minado y destruido en su fundamento mismo) (1938, 802). O’Gorman’s argument is driven by a vitalist, demographic logic that grinds slowly forward, from the colonial period to the Mestizo state of the post-Revolutionary Mexico in which he wrote. Segregation was bound to collapse under the pressure of “customs and vital necessities. ... Legal precepts and theoretical positions and doctrines, when they have no organic sympathy with the reality of their time, cannot impose themselves on forms of life that always rebel against every mechanistic treatment” (las costumbres y necesidades vitales. ... Los preceptos legales y las posiciones teóricas y doctrinas, cuando no tienen simpatía orgánica con la realidad de su tiempo, no pueden forzar las formas de la vida, en rebeldía siempre contra todo tratamiento mecanicista) (1938, 812–813). Here the dialectic is coupled to the state project of mestizaje, and history is propelled forward not by class struggle but biological necessity. The basic logic of the “separation” thesis has been affirmed by many historians over the years, especially before the critical turn in the 1990s (Mörner 1967). But even in more recent scholarship that foregrounds the socially constructed character of race and disavows mestizaje’s problematic racial baggage, the causal scaffolding of the demographic framework is often retained. The breakdown of the colonial order continues to turn on the assumption that “[m]iscegenation proceeded apace, bureaucratic impediments notwithstanding. No rigid apartheid could be sustained” (Knight 1990, 72); and that “rampant racial mixture,” persistent and unrelenting, “represented one of the realities of colonial life most threatening to the construction of an orderly society” (Vinson 2018, 5, 2). Whether implicit or explicit, the demographic base, represented as “increasingly mixed,” continues to drive the progress of history. Above I noted the tension between an approach to mestizaje that takes its demographic content as an objective reality and causal force, and a critical approach to race whose point of departure is its socially, rather than biologically, determined character. Likewise, there is nothing inherently destabilizing about “mixture,” precisely because mixture itself is both constructed and flexible. Even an apparently binary racial order can accommodate bodies that might otherwise be considered “mixed.”The dual republic system in colonial Latin America was far more flexible than is often assumed, since the “republic of Spaniards” was defined negatively, as a social space for non-Indians, rather than positively, as a social space for Spaniards. But the same is true even for the United States, where the law of hypodescent simply defined as Black anyone with any Black ancestry at all. The conceptual difficulties of mestizaje are not easily resolved. Still, if we are to take social construction seriously, it is important to challenge the easy attribution of demographic causality, which reinscribes an uncomfortably biological base as the subject of history. This means asking questions not about the effects of mestizaje but about the social processes that serve to define and constitute “mixture” and “purity” as such, in always provisional yet nevertheless stubborn and enduring formations. We might consider, for example, the racialization processes of “primitive mestizaje” (Nemser 2017, 27) by which a homogeneous “Indian” was created out of a heterogeneous collection of indigenous forms of humanity. A violent process of “mixture” rendered an entirely new “purity” without which the ideology of mestizaje itself, based on a mythical encounter between Spaniard and Indian, would be unthinkable.

From race to racialization So far I have made a case for an approach to race in colonial Latin America that centers not on the meaning of race but on processes of racialization and techniques of domination. In order to model this approach, I turn to the Jesuit José de Acosta’s influential work De procuranda indorum 49

Daniel Nemser

salute ([1588] 1984). Written in Peru in the 1570s, this extensive missionary treatise is divided into six books that address a wide range of issues related to the evangelization of the indigenous people of the Americas. As Anthony Pagden explains, “De procuranda became the standard work on its subject and Acosta’s methodological prescriptions for conversion something of an orthodoxy” (1986, 198). In practice, the book traveled far beyond the Americas, and missionaries from various religious orders deployed its teachings from North Africa to the Philippines. One of the most interesting aspects of Acosta’s approach is that it extended far beyond the minutiae of missionary work, integrating administrative questions of colonial governance and economic extraction into the evangelization project. In her illuminating reading of De procuranda, Ivonne del Valle (2011) frames Acosta’s work in response to the earlier critique of missionaries like Las Casas, who had argued forcefully that the conquest of the Americas was unjust and consequently that the Spanish must abandon the colonial enterprise. While acknowledging the illegitimacy of the conquest, Acosta argued that it was irrational to expect Spain to give up its colonies, and that in any case there was no one left to whom restitution could be paid. According to del Valle, Acosta’s intervention constitutes a sort of “political realism” that recognized the unjust violence on which Spanish colonialism depended, but responded with an effort not to eliminate but to rationalize this violence as part of a new and more effective colonial order. De procuranda opens by acknowledging the challenges posed by the diversity of the indigenous population, which made it impossible to formulate a single method of evangelization. In response, Acosta divides the “barbarians” into three general categories according to their level of cultural development, as represented by the degree of difference from the “norm” of Christian Europe. The first resembles European societies in nearly every way, having cities, governments, writing, and commerce, and lacking only Christianity; the second, which includes the Mexicas and Incas, lacks Christianity and writing; and the third lacks everything else as well, from fixed settlements to governing authorities. What is important about this classification is that it goes beyond a straightforward taxonomic impulse, and forms part of an effort to rationalize evangelization and harness the colonial state for that project.Thus, each class of “barbarian” is associated not only with a series of cultural characteristics but also with a particular evangelizing technique: the first requires reasoned persuasion; the second, the potential force of an imposed colonial state; and the third, the prior force necessary to compel its members to enter human society before any missionary work can begin (Acosta 1984, 55–71). Acosta’s classification figures centrally in scholarly debates about race in the Jesuit’s work. Some argue that the cultural markers on which Acosta focuses are the product of custom and education rather than innate, biological difference, and as such that they must be read as “primarily cultural rather than racial” (Pagden 1986, 19). Others read race in broader terms, foregrounding the mechanisms through which culture may appear as ossified and inherited, such that “evil custom [was] seemingly passed on biologically from parents to children” (Silverblatt 2004, 111). In spite of their differences, these analyses share a focus on Acosta’s cultural description of the indigenous people and thus turn primarily on the question of how race is defined. The former defines race strictly in terms of biology, and concludes that cultural representation cannot be racial; the latter uses a broader definition of race that could encompass certain modes of cultural representation. Although I have argued for a concept of race that is closer to the second approach, it seems to me that this debate can only take us so far. Starting from the process of racialization allows us to pose a different set of questions: not what race is, but how race is made and what kind of “work” it does. In Book III of De procuranda Acosta addresses the matter of colonial administration, and Chapters 6 through 10 focus specifically on indigenous tribute. Since the spiritual and temporal care of the indigenous population has fallen to the Spanish crown, he explains, it is important to 50

Race and domination in colonial Latin American studies

determine whether it is legitimate to force the Indians to pay tribute to their rulers. Acosta cites Romans 13 on rendering tribute to whom tribute is due, and reminds the reader that in these lines Paul is speaking to Roman Christians who have been subjected to the arbitrary rule of “certain Caesars who had usurped power by force in a free society” (unos césares que habían usurpado el poder por la fuerza en una sociedad libre) (1984, 425–427). Whether or not these circumstances were just, he continues, they had to pay tribute not only out of a fear of punishment but also as a matter of conscience.The parallel is clear: regardless of how Spain has acquired its colonies, the Indians are obligated to pay. Following this history lesson, Acosta turns to the concrete mechanisms of tribute collection. The usual method, he explains, is, first, to determine which goods are abundant in every province (such as clothing, cattle, minerals, or silver); next, to count how many Indians are present in each town or tribe; and finally, to calculate on this basis the amount of tribute each Indian can comfortably pay. Acosta goes on to argue, however, that determining what the Indians can pay is not enough—it is equally important to determine what they ought to pay (1984, 439–441). The usual way of collecting tribute is thus harmful and unacceptable. At this point in the argument, Acosta makes what at first glance appears to be a surprising claim. “The question I ask myself is this” (La pregunta que yo me hago es ésta), he writes: If this mode of contribution is proposed in Spain or France or other nations of Europe, such that everyone is required to pay what they comfortably can, why will it seem utterly unjust and iniquitous, while if it is applied to the Indians, just and holy? (Si se propone este modo de contribución en España o Francia u otras naciones de Europa de forma que a cada uno se les exija lo que cómodamente pueda dar, ¿por qué parecerá a todos injustísimo y lleno de iniquidad, y si se aplica a los indios, justo y santo?) (1984, 441) By situating Spaniards and French within the same tributary logic as Indians, Acosta appears to part ways with an imperial reason that draws hard and fast distinctions between metropole and colony. What is right in Europe is right in the Americas. On its face at least, Acosta’s Christian universalism thus endorses the principles of equality and reciprocity.7 The turn comes in the next chapter. There Acosta documents the opinion of those most knowledgeable about the Indians: Being as they are an indolent and lazy nation, if they are not forced to work and move and concern themselves with acquiring what they need to pay tribute, they live their lives stupidly as if they were sheep and shamefully dedicate themselves to the activities of irrational beings. (Siendo como son una nación indolente y perezosa, si no se les fuerza a trabajar y a moverse y preocuparse para tener con que pagar los impuestos, pasan la vida estúpidamente como si fueran ovejas y se dedican vergonzosamente a ocupaciones de seres irracionales.) (1984, 443) Although he often rejects such conventional wisdom, in this case Acosta agrees. He adds that the Incas also held this view, and thus forced their subjects to work excessively. Referencing accounts of indigenous elders, Acosta explains that after their basic needs had been met commoners were 51

Daniel Nemser

even assigned pointless tasks, like moving rocks from one place to another. Framing the claims of both Spanish and Inca authorities in a more philosophical register, he returns to Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery: “The barbarians are all of a servile disposition. And for this reason it became a saying, as Aristotle recounts, that slaves should never be left idle. Idleness makes them insolent” (Los bárbaros son todos de talante servil. Y por eso se convirtió incluso en un refrán, como refiere Aristóteles, que a los esclavos no se les debe tener nunca ociosos. La ociosidad los hace insolentes) (1984, 445). Because of their indolent character, the only way to get the Indians to work is to require them to pay tribute. The only question, then, is not whether they should be forced to pay, but how much and for whose benefit. Tribute obligations must be moderate not excessive, in other words, and the ultimate end must be the Indians’ own good rather than that of their rulers. For Acosta, the Indians do not recognize their own interests, so colonial authorities must guide them toward that transcendent end (Bentancor 2017, 165–168). In these chapters, Acosta both justifies and proposes a plan to rationalize Indian tribute, articulating a transition from the unchecked plunder of the initial phase of the conquest to a new mode of orderly and efficient extraction under a newly consolidated colonial state. Acknowledging the illegitimate origins of Spanish rule, he nevertheless rejects the Lascasian demand to abandon the colonial enterprise. Likewise, though recognizing the harmful effects of tribute, he calls not for its abolition but merely for its moderation. Acosta’s “political realism” (del Valle 2011) cannot resolve the dilemma posed by the demand for true justice, and this demand continues to constitute a horizon for radical politics today. Del Valle’s analysis helpfully centers the operations of racialization and the work of race in Acosta’s treatise, precisely because she directs our attention away from the representation of the indigenous population and onto the practices of colonial rule. If race is understood as a product of racialization processes, it makes methodological sense to start from these processes rather than their effects. Instead of asking whether Acosta’s representations are “racial” or not, in other words, my reading asks how colonial mechanisms of extraction and techniques of domination function as racializing procedures, producing the category of the “Indian” by articulating a naturalizing discourse of indolence with a concrete set of forced labor and tribute obligations. The generalized ascription of indolence mirrors the generalized character of these obligations, which are materially applied to the entire indigenous population. From this perspective, tribute functions as a modality of racial domination.

Conclusion For del Valle, Acosta’s work brings into relief a constitutive contradiction of the modern world, inaugurated by the foundational violence of the conquest. Efforts to undo this violence—the only path toward justice—appear as “a collection of absurdities and impossibilities” (una colección de disparates e imposibles), while “the continuity of violence made coherent and functional is presented as the only realistic option” (la continuidad de la violencia hecha coherente y funcional, se presenta como la única opción realista) (2011, 321). This, she argues, is why colonial studies matters. It captures both the historical conditions that gave rise to the present order and the material and ideological operations that rationalize and naturalize its ongoing injustice. A similar claim can be made about the concept of race.The argument that race is a “modern” phenomenon is useful because it exposes race as socially constructed rather than transhistorical, but it also raises difficult questions about what it means to talk about “premodern”—or, more usefully, nonracial—modes of differentiation. These questions are commonly answered with reference to the category of culture in general and religion in particular. For example, above I pointed to the centrality of the conquest of the Americas in Omi and Winant’s account of the 52

Race and domination in colonial Latin American studies

historical emergence of race, and they argue that, before that point, even the sharpest antagonisms “were always and everywhere religiously interpreted” (1994, 61). The possibility of conversion presumably meant that one could change religions at will, which seems to distinguish religious identity from the fixity of race.8 And yet religion is also profoundly entangled with what Omi and Winant take to be the earliest examples of racial discourse: the “discovery” raised disturbing questions as to whether all could be considered part of the same “family of man,” and more practically, the extent to which native peoples could be exploited and enslaved. Thus religious debates flared over the attempt to reconcile the various Christian metaphysics with the existence of peoples who were more “different” than any whom Europe had previously known. ... [T]he “discovery” signaled a break from the previous proto-racial awareness by which Europe contemplated its “Others” in a relatively disorganized fashion. (1994, 61–62) On the one hand, then, social antagonisms that are “religiously interpreted” are set aside as a premodern holdover; on the other hand, “religious debates” over human variation are cast as an epochal break. This confusion is symptomatic of a tendency to conceptualize religion and race as radically dichotomous rather than mutually constitutive—a point that the field of colonial Latin American studies has helped to clarify (Delgado and Moss 2018). Engaging with recent scholarship on the ideology of limpieza de sangre, for example, would underscore the institutional mechanisms through which blood was transformed into a carrier of Jewish and Muslim heresy on the Iberian peninsula, and with the colonization of the Americas was reconfigured into the hierarchical system of classification known as the sistema de castas (Nirenberg 2007; Martínez 2008; Hering Torres 2012). Given the rise of Islamophobia in recent decades, the relation between religion and race is an especially urgent question. Critics like Junaid Rana (2011) and Leerom Medovoi (2012) have framed the racialization of the Muslim within a logic of war not as a recent phenomenon that emerged after 9/11 with the rise of the War on Terror, but as part of a long genealogy of racial formation reaching back (at least) to the emergence of limpieza de sangre on the Iberian peninsula. One important insight of this scholarship is that race has never been reducible to skin color, and as such the analysis of Islamophobia “requires a historical conceptualization of old and new racisms in which a theory of race is socially constructed between the concepts of the cultural and the biological” (Rana 2011, 28). Racialization processes thus generate and exploit varied modalities of group differentiation along multiple axes and across multiple temporalities. As I have suggested, contemporary racism may share more with the early modern/colonial period than the so-called modern, biological racism of the nineteenth century. The confusion in Omi and Winant’s analysis of religion and race highlights a final reason why colonial studies offers a valuable vantage point for race theory.We might read their ambiguous distinction generously, as a function of an analysis focused on a historical rupture between nonracial and racial configurations of difference. Transitions are conceptually messy, and do not occur from one day or year to the next—1492 is, in this sense, a metonym—but necessarily involve some conjugation of continuity and discontinuity. Still, there is value in the denaturalizing implications of historical breaks, the insistence that race and racism are not permanent features of human existence. Doing colonial studies, as del Valle suggests, means grappling with transition. And from an abolitionist perspective, thinking the beginning of race also means opening up the possibility of thinking the end of race as a category of domination. “Beginning from radically different histories of racialisation,” writes Chen, “abolitionist anti-racist struggles would 53

Daniel Nemser

aim to dismantle the machinery of ‘race’ at the heart of a fantasy of formal freedom. ... ‘Race’ can thus be imagined as an emancipatory category not from the point of view of its affirmation, but through its abolition” (2013, 223, 208).

Notes 1 These works include, but are not limited to, Carrera 2003; Lewis 2003; Katzew 2004; Silverblatt 2004; Hill 2005; Martínez 2008; Fisher and O’Hara 2009; Hering Torres et al. 2012; O’Toole 2012; Bryant 2014; Rappaport 2014; Twinam 2015; Schwaller 2016; Nemser 2017; and Vinson 2018. 2 This “limited cross-pollination between studies of race in Latin America and the larger field of Race Studies in general” is among the many valuable insights offered by Delgado and Moss (2018, 41) in a suggestive review of recent historiographical literature on religion and race in the Iberian Atlantic world. Although my focus is somewhat different, this chapter overlaps in significant ways with their broader argument. Meanwhile, Bonilla-Silva (2015, 81) observes that race theory has so far failed to take seriously the “oldest racial regimes” that emerged with the conquest of the Americas, and proposes returning to these initial moments of racialization as a valuable direction for future research. 3 Here Chen (2013, 207–208) builds on the work of the historian Barbara Fields, who offers a slightly different formulation: “Substituted for racism, race transforms the act of a subject into an attribute of the object” (Fields 2001, 48). While both racialization and racism refer to active processes external to the racialized object, I foreground the former for two reasons. First, racialization stresses the historical aspect of racial formation and thus offers a better framework for tracking the production and reproduction of race over time. Second, the idea of racism is tightly associated with individual, moralistic notions of “prejudice” and “discrimination.” The late historian Patrick Wolfe distinguishes between “race as doctrine,” the relatively coherent and formalized elaboration of racial discourse, and “racialisation, race in action” as a series of “racialising practices [that] seek to maintain population-specific modes of colonial domination through time” (2016, 10). Wolfe thus stresses the priority of racialization over race by arguing that European colonialism did not require the elaboration of racial doctrines before the eighteenth century but proceeded on the basis of Christianity (2016, 10–11). Of course, things look somewhat different from the perspective of colonial Latin America, but in a sense the difference is merely a question of timing, since the structural relation between conquest and racialization remains the same, while as I suggest below the Iberian case makes clear that religion and race are more difficult to disentangle than Wolfe assumes. 4 Recent historiography of race in colonial Latin America has tended to foreground agency over structure. In the introduction to their edited volume, Fisher and O’Hara acknowledge this tendency and define identity as the “nexus” of structure and agency, or “categorization and self-understanding,” in order to provide “a natural check on the proliferation of agency” (2009, 20–21). But because the formation of the archive and the constraints of the discipline privilege exceptional cases, the essays in their collection nevertheless highlight colonial actors demonstrating “creativity and agency,” taking advantage of “opportunities to reinvent oneself,” “subvert[ing] colonial assumptions of ... racial deficiencies,” deploying “creative and adaptive forms of resistance,” and “even transcend[ing] the racial categories imposed on them” (2009, 22–26). 5 An important exception is Quijano (2000), whose work on the “coloniality of power” pushes the transition to modernity, and the emergence of race, back to the conquest of the Americas. 6 See Loomba (2007, 597) on the “horror of anachronism” and the periodization of race. 7 Here Acosta follows the influential Dominican theologian Francisco de Vitoria, who had insisted a half century earlier that the Indians’ deficiencies were due not to their innate inferiority but to their barbarous education: “Even among our own people ... we can see many peasants who are little different from brute animals” (Pagden 1986, 97, 160). 8 Similarly, despite the Enlightenment emphasis on taxonomy, eighteenth-century theories of the body are often read as nonracial, since the privileging of external factors like climate meant that bodies were treated as fluid rather than fixed (Nemser 2017, 163–164).

Works cited Acosta, José de. [1588] 1984. De procuranda indorum salute: Pacificación y colonización. Edited and translated by Luciano Pereña et al. Madrid: CSIC. Balibar, Etienne. 1991. “Is There a ‘Neo-Racism’?” In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, edited by Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, 17–28. New York:Verso.

54

Race and domination in colonial Latin American studies Bentancor, Orlando. 2017. The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2015. “More than Prejudice: Restatement, Reflections, and New Directions in Critical Race Theory.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1 (1): 75–89. Bryant, Sherwin K. 2014. Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Carrera, Magali M. 2003. Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin: University of Texas Press. Chen, Chris. 2013. “The Limit Point of Capitalist Equality: Notes toward an Abolitionist Antiracism.” Endnotes 3: 202–223. Cope, R. Douglas. 1994. The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Delgado, Jessica, and Kelsey Moss. 2018. “Religion and Race in the Early Modern Iberian Atlantic.” In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Race in American History, edited by Kathryn Gin Lum and Paul Harvey, 40–60. Oxford: Oxford University Press. del Valle, Ivonne. 2011. “José de Acosta: Entre el realismo político y disparates e imposibles, o por qué importan los estudios coloniales.” In Estudios transatlánticos postcoloniales II: Mito, archivo, disciplina: Cartografías culturales, edited by Ileana Rodríguez and Josebe Martínez, 291–324. Barcelona: Anthropos. Du Bois, W.E.B. [1935] 1998. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: The Free Press. Fields, Barbara J. 2001. “Whiteness, Racism, and Identity.” International Labor and Working-Class History 60: 48–56. Fisher, Andrew B., and Matthew D. O’Hara, eds. 2009. Imperial Subjects: Race and Identity in Colonial Latin America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2007. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press. Greer, Margaret R., Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, eds. 2007. Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hering Torres, Max S. 2012. “Purity of Blood: Problems of Interpretation.” In Race and Blood in the Iberian World, edited by Max S. Hering Torres, María Elena Martínez, and David Nirenberg, 11–38. Zurich: LitVerlag. ———, María Elena Martínez, and David Nirenberg, eds. 2012. Race and Blood in the Iberian World. Zurich: LitVerlag. Hill, Ruth. 2005. Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America: A Postal Inspector’s Exposé. Nashville:Vanderbilt University Press. Holt, Thomas C. 2000. The Problem of Race in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Katzew, Ilona. 2004. Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. New Haven:Yale University Press. Knight, Alan. 1990. “Racism, Revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910–1940.” In The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940, edited by Richard Graham, 71–113. Austin: University of Texas Press. Lewis, Laura A. 2003. Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Loomba, Ania. 2002. Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2007. “Periodization, Race, and Global Contact.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37 (3): 595–620. Martínez, María Elena. 2008. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. Medovoi, Leerom. 2012. “Dogma-Line Racism: Islamophobia and the Second Axis of Race.” Social Text 30 (2): 43–74. Mörner, Magnus. 1967. Race Mixture in the History of Latin America. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Nemser, Daniel. 2017. Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press. Nirenberg, David. 2007. “Race and the Middle Ages:The Case of Spain and Its Jews.” In Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, edited by Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, 71–87. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

55

Daniel Nemser O’Gorman, Edmundo. 1938. “Reflexiones sobre la distribución urbana colonial de la ciudad de México.” Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación 9 (4): 787–815. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd edition. New York: Routledge. O’Toole, Rachel Sarah. 2012. Bound Lives:Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Pagden, Anthony. 1986. The Fall of Natural Man:The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla:Views from South 1 (3): 533–580. Rana, Junaid. 2011. Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rappaport, Joanne. 2014. The Disappearing Mestizo: Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Schwaller, Robert C. 2016. Géneros de Gente in Early Colonial Mexico: Defining Racial Difference. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Shih, Shu-Mei. 2008. “Comparative Racialization: An Introduction.” PMLA 123 (5): 1347–1362. Silverblatt, Irene. 2004. Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Singh, Nikhil Pal. 2017. Race and America’s Long War. Berkeley: University of California Press. Twinam, Ann. 2015. Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Vinson, Ben. 2018. Before Mestizaje:The Frontiers of Race and Caste in Colonial Mexico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wade, Peter. 2010. Race and Ethnicity in Latin America, 2nd edition. London: Pluto Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1983. Historical Capitalism. London:Verso. Winant, Howard. 2001. The World Is a Ghetto: Race and Democracy since World War II. New York: Basic Books. Wolfe, Patrick. 2016. Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race. New York:Verso.

56

2 SELF-REPRESENTATION AND SELF-GOVERNANCE IN EARLY LATIN AMERICA Karen Graubart

When, in the mid-twentieth century, historians turned to examine subaltern voices in colonial Latin American history, they faced the dual challenge of finding and evaluating sources from marginalized peoples and of reformulating narratives that privileged the perspectives of Spanish conquistadors and administrators. In this chapter I examine some theoretical and methodological innovations that have emerged from these concerns, focusing especially on greater Mexico and the Andes, regions with deep historical archives for the early colonial period as well as profound historiographical traditions. Scholars broke new ground by insisting that indigenous, Black, and female perspectives could be represented, forcing the field to recognize the coeval invention of a colonial world. Indeed, the literature has moved away from representing these groups as resisting or accommodating colonial power to argue that they also reimagined colonial and anti-colonial projects. Yet academic analysis still falters when it takes up the question of female, indigenous, and Black self-theorization. We need to write intellectual histories of conquest and colonization from these perspectives, by retheorizing certain kinds of archival documentation as acts of self-representation.

Ethnohistory The rise of ethnohistory in the mid-twentieth century was central to how Western academics wrote histories of Latin American conquest and colonization.That field’s attention to native and native-language sources, its alignment of colonial history and literary studies with archaeology and anthropology, and its decentering of traditional victor-centered narratives produced new analyses of conquest and colonial adaptation. Ethnohistorians argued that native culture was not destroyed with the Spanish conquest, despite cultural and political traumas. The literature was characterized by the revaluation of already-known and the identification of previouslyunknown, indigenous-language (or mixed language) texts: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1992), Nahuatl texts translated and published by Ángel María Garibay (e.g., 1958) and Miguel León-Portilla (e.g., 1959, 1964) as well as their coeditorship of the journal Estudios de Cultura Nahuatl at UNAM, and the corpus of unpublished notarial documents (in Spanish and indigenous languages) characterized by James Lockhart (1992) as “mundane.” Two major directions emerged. One, studying Mesoamerica, and sometimes calling itself

57

Karen Graubart

the “New Philology,” prioritized learning indigenous languages and scouring (and publishing) early colonial resources in those languages (Restall 2003). The philologists, led in the US by Lockhart (1992), argued that indigenous-language colonial texts offered a lens into indigenous worldviews, especially to the experience of social change. A second direction in the Andes, where early colonial Quechua texts are rare, focused on indigenous labor, political disruption, and the great rebellions of the late colonial period (Glave 1989; Stern 1982; Spalding 1984). It is hard to overstate the importance of this literature. Scholars produced nuanced works that began from the premise that indigenous inhabitants of the Americas were not only not erased by conquest, but that they continued to produce meaningful culture, even as those meanings shifted in contact. Early collections such as León-Portilla’s Visión de los vencidos (1959) suggested rich possibilities for countering Spanish conquest narratives with heterogeneous native perspectives, even while those perspectives emerged in a context of already-existing colonial rule. María Rostworowski’s tireless combing of Peruvian archives distilled Inca points of view, and her insistence on the centrality of gender analysis revealed the ways that Inca women participated in imperial society before the conquest and how the women of the Inca line fared after (1989b). Rostworowski also paid attention to non-Inca cultures of the South American coastline, offering a more complex vision of imperial history prior to conquest (1989a). Locating caches of archival materials that reveal heterogeneous perspectives was a crucial first step. The new ethnohistories argued that it was possible to tell an indigenous history of Spanish colonization. Lockhart’s Nahuas After the Conquest (1992) examined the transformation of the Mesoamerican altepetl or ethnic state through Nahuatl-language notarial documents from the first decades of Spanish rule. He tracked the entrance of Spanish political and religious terminology into indigenous-language legal documents as an indicator of cultural transformation: from loan words to rearticulations of native life.While his argument was limited by the use of notarial documents—a Spanish legal form, carried out by trained notaries to accomplish Spanish colonial legal tasks—his findings created space for a vast enterprise of taking stock of native-language sources and constructing local indigenous histories. In the Andes, in the absence of Quechua documentation, historians turned to archaeology and anthropology to supplement and provoke new Spanish-language sources. Works like Karen Spalding’s Huarochirí (1984), John Murra’s The Economic Organization of the Inca State (1980), and Rostworowski’s Estructuras andinas del poder (1983) mined chronicles and notarial documents, as well as burials, monumental and domestic architecture, quipus (knotted cords used for accounting and other functions), and land tenure to tell history from an indigenous perspective. This wave of often activist-inflected scholarship, coinciding with a period of leftist movements and rightwing retrenchments in Latin America, and anti-imperialist critique within the US left, unleashed new ways to talk about cultural and political change in the century after the conquest. It produced theoretical debates over descriptive terms such as acculturation—criticized by some scholars as erasing indigenous agency—and transculturation or hybridity, which in different ways emphasized the two-way nature of cultural change (Ortíz 2002; Rama 1984; Bhabha 1985). It also allowed for subtler periodizations, drawing upon changes evident in internal documentation and especially within language and religious practices. Some studies introduced ethnogenesis or the recognition that ethnic groups were never static but constantly reinvented themselves (Powers 1995). Many of the monographs that emerged from this paradigm shift, however, maintained the large contours of the old field: Spanish conquistadors arrived with their germs, steel, and laws, and if they initially resisted, in the end indigenous communities experienced an inevitable loss of political and social control.

58

Self-representation and self-governance in early Latin America

Indigenous self-governance An important corollary of this work developed first in Mesoamerica, where native-language mundane records also included documents produced for indigenous cabildos.Those documents, identified by Lockhart (1992) as key to understanding indigenous mentalities over time, could show shifts in property relations, by marking linguistic novelties and legal transformations (Kellogg 1995;Terraciano 2004). It is arguable whether these actually reveal anything substantive that Spanish-language documents do not: they largely translated Spanish legal ideas into local languages, in a form that could be enforced by Spanish courts (Burns 2010). But the existence of paperwork from indigenous notaries and indigenous cabildos in Mexico reveals the depth of self-governance far into (and often beyond) the colonial period. Spain governed its New World holdings mostly by incorporating indigenous polities within a ­polycentric legal regime (Benton 2002). By recognizing certain elites as native lords (generalized as caciques, a Taíno word picked up in the early Caribbean) and recognizing their jurisdiction over certain civil aspects of daily life, Spanish authorities intentionally created spaces for native self-governance. Royal officials and the Catholic Church sought to intervene in these spaces, by requiring direct royal and Catholic oversight in the forms of corregidores [provincial magistrates] and priests, and by promoting new non-hereditary indigenous officials who would compete with caciques for political and economic control. High mortality rates and migration also contributed to the reorganization of indigenous polities into congregaciones or reducciones, which combined dispersed populations and moved them to accommodate Spanish needs for tribute, coerced labor rotations, and conversion efforts. Nonetheless, indigenous polities continued to function, utilizing processes and law that met the community’s ongoing needs for justice. Their strategies encompassed internal acts, utilizing their political space to organize society according to group norms and beliefs, and also external acts, using writing to push for local demands in the courts (Yannakakis 2008; Ruíz Medrano 2011). Self-governance and self-representation ensured that colonial law and rule had coeval origins. Relatively little documentation of these internal processes remains. Mesoamericanists, with access to indigenous-language documentation, produced new attempts to reconstruct local indigenous polities. Andeanists have attended to town politics using Spanish-language records kept by indigenous notaries or by analyzing Spanish bureaucratic and juridical records for the gaps that would be filled in by local indigenous officials (Graubart 2015; Puente Luna 2016). These histories offer insight into the ways that local governance intersected with Spanish expectations, actions that are not easily reduced to notions of capitulation or resistance. For example, an extraordinary cache of records from Tlaxcala, a key ally to Cortés in the conquest of Mexico, reveals its struggles to remain somewhat independent of Spanish authority (Martínez Baracs 2008). Tlaxcalan elites appeared before the king of Spain in 1529 on behalf of their communities, a confederation of noble houses and unaffiliated towns, requesting remuneration for their services in the conquest.The king ordered them exempt from encomienda (they would pay tribute directly to the crown rather than to any grantee) and recognized them as an independent province subject to royal authority and local customary law under a native cabildo or municipal government. The cabildo was a Spanish-style political form, but in Tlaxcala it was made to accommodate local forms of governance. Rather than annually elected alcaldes (judges) and regidores (council members), the dynastic rulers (tlatoque) of the four noble houses (tecalli) that made up the confederation occupied these offices for life. The governorship would rotate among them for two-year

59

Karen Graubart

terms, and the native nobility made up the electing body. This gave the cabildo the formal structure of a Spanish town, but in content it acceded to local ways of understanding politics. Indigenous notaries kept records, called Actas, of cabildo meetings in Nahuatl written in Roman script. These were nearly always noblemen, representing their own tecalli, trained in Spanish legal conventions and generally bilingual. Partial session minutes from the cabildo meetings exist for the period 1547–1567 (published as Lockhart et al. 1986). Like many such documents, they have been read for evidence of cultural survival and adaptation during this early period, as well as how the towns met and challenged growing colonial demands. The Actas help redefine indigenous self-governance. More than finding continuity or substituting new names for old titles, self-governance reflects the preservation of local forms of justice while the external context shifts. A rich example emerges from the assessment of colonial tribute. Tribute was assessed as a head tax in crops or commodities on adult indigenous male commoners. Spanish administrators created tribute schedules by censusing communities to learn how many adult males lived in each governed unit; they charged caciques with delivering the total amount to Spanish authorities at periodic intervals. Spaniards understood the tax as equally assessed upon commoner families, with nobles exempted. Historians have focused upon the way that such a head tax impacted families and communities as populations diminished (Spalding 1984). Tlaxcala offers a counter-narrative. In 1548, its cabildo established a progressive tribute collection scale (Lockhart et al. 1986, 67–69). Residents were ranked from poorest commoners to richest nobles and rulers. Each was assessed an amount of corn that correlated to their relative wealth. The four rulers and the alcalde would decide what category each tribute payer fell into. With the caveat that commoners likely labored for the nobles, and thus bore a larger share of the work, the schedule demonstrates that those with more resources were expected to contribute more, rather than exempt themselves. This is, then, a rare case of the archive exposing the local justice encoded in tribute assessment. The cabildo rulings also reveal the difficulties of enforcing local justice. Certain nobles were selling off lands illegally, and the cabildo called upon their family members to confiscate the remaining property and evict the seller from their noble house. That is, enforcement would be carried out through noble kin groups rather than by an external police force. In another case, the cabildo recognized its inability to control the trade in cochineal, which it argued was undermining indigenous hierarchies by making some commoners rich (Lockhart et al. 1986, 79–84). In this case, they sent a delegation of nobles to visit the Viceroy in Mexico City to request that he place a limit on the number of cactus plants anyone could have in Tlaxcala, which they could then enforce locally. If Spanish law largely viewed the republic as a mechanism for organizing tax payments, setting market days, and punishing drunkards—all things attested within Tlaxcala’s Actas—local leaders also saw it as a space in which they could protect their interests in a changing world, theorizing what it meant to be Tlaxcalan and elite under insurgent Spanish rule. The analysis of Indian republics as organic polities rather than spaces of colonial domination or mimicry creates the space to recognize local politics, justice, and colonial law more broadly, as having mutual origins.

Intermediaries Ethnohistories of conquest brought a critical focus on the roles of translators and mediators in the implantation of Spanish and Portuguese institutions. This attention was not new: Bernal Díaz del Castillo, one of Cortés’ foot soldiers in the conquest of Tenochtitlan, emphasized the roles played by two shipwrecked Spanish soldiers who found refuge of a kind among the Maya, and especially that of Doña Marina or Malintzin, an enslaved adolescent girl the Maya gifted to 60

Self-representation and self-governance in early Latin America

Cortés, who served as his guide, translator, and sexual partner (Díaz del Castillo 1970). Díaz used Malintzin as part of a framework to undermine Cortés’ claim that he, alone, was the vehicle of Spanish conquest. But modern historians and literary scholars have seen intermediaries as ways to explore cultural adaptation, and especially the ways that they negotiated multiple political identities as they made their way in colonial societies. Recent studies of Malintzin (Townsend 2007) rightly emphasize her genius: a girl from an elite family in central Mexico, placed into slavery and passed through the hands of diverse Maya speakers before landing in Cortés’ party. Her mastery of Nahuatl,Yucatec Maya, and Spanish, as well as a variety of political cultures made her a key actor on behalf of her Spanish captors as well as herself: she ended her short life the wife of a Spanish conquistador and mother of Cortés’ illegitimate but beloved son Don Martín. It is this astuteness which has become the central trope in new conquest histories, which argue that indigenous and African go-betweens were able to exploit their particular and doubled knowledges to broker colonial relations. Earlier studies of this brokerage focused on elites, mostly caciques who balanced on the knife’s edge of early colonial rule. Required to fulfill colonial demands while maintaining the cooperation of their subjects, these men (and some women) sought to temper outrageous encomendero demands, they litigated on behalf of their communities, and they drove their subjects to engage in new enterprises that brought income but also undermined the social fabric. Blistering critiques revealed that Andean elites, through self-interest or desperation, entered into legal relationships with Spaniards that dispossessed their subjects of shared resources (Spalding 1973; Varón Gabai 1980; Stern 1982). In the 1990s, the trope of the go-between shaped many histories, coinciding, as Yanna Yannakakis has noted, with a new relationship between some Latin American states and their indigenous communities (Yannakakis 2008). Some of these histories were extensions of the brokerage analytic, such as narratives of the armies of indigenous conquistadores that brought colonial rule from central Mexico to the Yucatan and Guatemala (Yannakakis 2008; Matthew 2012). Such studies effectively changed both the periodization of conquest—pushing the narrative both back into precolonial conflicts and forward into a longer process of settlement and domination—and the history of how colonization took place. Historians have used the notion of the colonial go-between to describe people, often commoners, of mixed ancestry who were able to act as intermediaries between different cultural groups. Some of this literature drew upon Richard White’s transformative The Middle Ground, which looked for spaces in Euro-indigenous contact in North America where neither group could compel the other to its will (White 1999). Middle grounds were particular spaces of misunderstanding and desire for communication where mediation was possible and shared practices could emerge. Some of the most powerful studies of this phenomenon in Latin America have come from Brazil and the Caribbean, sites where Atlantic slavery introduced African peoples into societies also rent by conflict between Europeans and indigenous peoples. John Monteiro's Negros da terra (1994) upended the early history of Brazil, demonstrating that São Paulo was founded through Portuguese settlers' intentional exploitation of indigenous conflicts. Settlers supported and engaged in raids that transferred Guaraní and Tupi slaves to coastal plantations, and brokered friendlier relations with favored groups that ended up destroyed by disease, war, and crisis. Alida Metcalf ’s Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500–1600 (2008) asked how Portuguese conquerors and missionaries, indigenous polities, and free and enslaved Africans—and their mixed descendants—interacted and affected one another through simple coexistence, transactional brokerage, and mutual representation. In this analysis, the Portuguese ultimately succeeded in colonization because mamelucos (mixed European-indigenous peoples) negotiated terms on their behalf. 61

Karen Graubart

Other studies have contemplated the ways that brokerage produced new cultures that were not reducible to discourses of resistance and continuity. James Sweet (2009) has argued that by the time African slaves arrived in Spanish and Portuguese colonies they had themselves often passed through numerous re-creations of their own identities on the African continent. His study of Domingos Alvares depicts a man from West Africa who experienced a conquest by Dahomey, was sold into Atlantic slavery and arrived in Pernambuco, Brazil, where he began on a career as an acclaimed healer in the 1730s. He purchased his freedom in Rio, where he opened numerous healing centers, only to be arrested by the Inquisition and sent to Lisbon, where he was convicted. He lived in exile, moving around Portugal, followed by the Inquisition, disappearing from view in Bragança in 1749. Alvares’ identity was not reducible to African, Brazilian, and Portuguese influences, rather he cultivated communities of followers who spoke languages he knew, recognized his healing practices, and constructed relationships based upon shared spiritual beliefs in the place where they met. The move to analyzing the ways that native, African, and mixed-race people facilitated cultural and physical contact reflects critical attention to the local production of power and the politics of ethnic and racial identity in the emerging colonial world. Social historians have assimilated Foucauldian theory to the point of naturalization: rare is the academic who sees unilateral domination or searches for authentic agents of culture. Instead, these approaches draw upon a foundational literature on local forms of agency to demonstrate that, while colonial powers eventually followed up their optimistic claims of possession with increasingly hegemonic social, political, and economic institutions, the culture that emerged was dependent upon indigenous and African acts and beliefs.

Indigenous intellectuals The study of indigenous intellectuals in the early colonial Spanish Americas is quite dynamic although it began as a fairly narrow scholarship, generally the study of letrados, lettered (and often specifically Latinate) elite men. The Nahua intellectuals Domingo Francisco de San Antón Chimalpahin, Bartolomé de Alva, and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, and the Andean Garcilaso de la Vega “El Inca” have long been considered part of the canon of indigenous-descent cronistas whose descriptions of conquest and colonial society stood in counterpoint to the masses of Spanish soldier-authors. In the middle of the twentieth century scholars such as Franklin Pease in Peru and Miguel León-Portilla and Ángel María Garibay in Mexico brought, respectively, Guaman Poma de Ayala and Fernando Alvarado Tezozomoc and others into the conversation. Rolena Adorno’s (1986) study of Guaman Poma was a landmark in diagnosing the way that an indigenous man, born around the time of the conquest, contemplated his changing world and his place in it. Similarly, Chimalpahin’s Nahuatl Annales has been mined for its extremely particular experience of events in Mexico City, as a counter to Spanish official reports (Martínez 2004, 2011). These unique, elite texts are an important and long-standing challenge to the official narrative. Scholars have also recognized the indigenous informants for many ethnographic texts produced by Spanish priests and bureaucrats, including the Florentine Codex in Mexico, the Huarochirí Manuscript in Peru, and the many ethnographic reports produced for viceroys of New Spain and Peru (Ávila 1999; Sahagún 2012). But these texts are also shrouded in mystery, lacking basic biographical information about their indigenous informants, their education and access to literacy, and their roles in indigenous societies. Writing was perhaps the central technology of the Spanish empire. Ángel Rama, a Uruguayan critic, wrote La ciudad letrada shortly before his death in 1983. He argued that lettered men—lawyers, notaries, bureaucrats—brokered the relationship between cultural practice, state power, and 62

Self-representation and self-governance in early Latin America

urbanism in colonial Latin America.Their documents articulated the ordered city that Spanish and Portuguese imperial policies demanded, the “ordering principle revealed itself as a hierarchical space transposed by analogy into a hierarchical design of urban space” (Rama 1984, 3). But that lettered world was not solely inhabited by men of Spanish descent. The refusal to offer access to higher learning and most bureaucratic positions to indigenous and Black men meant that they could not be recognized as lawyers, jurists, doctors, or viceroys in the early colonial world. Scholars interested in that intellectual realm have shifted their attention to the men who wrote down the words of the powerful. Kathryn Burns (2014, 237) noted the presence, in Guaman Poma’s extraordinary letter, of Indian notaries whom he called quillcaycamayoc [paper keeper] on the model of the quipucamayoc or keeper of the quipus, one of the main accounting and representational devices of the Andes.These notaries wrote in Spanish, and their archival production is fragmentary but not unknown (for an example, Puente Luna 2016).Their particular biographies are largely lost, though they might be pursued through the thick weeds of the notarial archives. The search for lettered indigenous men and women is deepest in greater Mexico, where a pre‑Hispanic literate culture rapidly adapted to its new circumstances (McDonough 2014). It is likely that many of the newly literate in the Spanish alphabet were formerly the literati of pictographic or performative representations. Fray Bernardino de Sahagún and his informants described the Nahua tlamatini or sage in their Florentine Codex as the one who “possesses writings, owns books, is the tradition, the road; a leader of men, a rower, a companion, a bearer of responsibility, a guide” (Ramos and Yannakakis 2014, ix). Sahagún's assistants likely came from this tradition, and were trained after conquest in Spanish writing practices by clergy and other educators. But this made Mexico a home to readers, writers, and interpreters: an indigenous intellectual class which largely functioned as an arm of the church and colonial administration. Their intellectual production often drew upon Western classical traditions as well as their own, formulating new genres of writing and cultural expression. Similarly, native assistants to the church carried out intellectual work, from fiscales who mediated between the parish priest and an indigenous flock, to the translators, scribes, and companions of the extirpators of idolatry (such as Guaman Poma himself). These men translated indigenous worldviews to Christians and vice versa, although their acts were often verbal and are difficult to identify or theorize, but would be valuable subjects of an intellectual history. Regina Harrison’s (2014) history of the development of the rite and semantics of confession in the Andes, for example, opens up the possibility of studying the testimony of witnesses at idolatry trials not so much for revelations about an indigenous worldview outside of or in contradiction to Christianity, as for evidence of the reception of Christian precepts in those communities. But there are encouraging new ways to approach indigenous actors as intellectuals rather than representatives of a shared worldview. Among the most important cases was the redefinition of the mechanism of heritable noble office, the cacicazgo, by indigenous elites through litigation. Karen Vieira Powers (1998) offers a classic account in her study of the Duchisela family in Ecuador, who rewrote their own histories and the story of the cacicazgo they held as they maneuvered to hold regional power over more than two centuries. Powers presents this as a narrative about a particular elite family that fought for legitimacy using Spanish law whilst also justifying their position internally to their subjects. As María Elena Martínez (2011) argued, the reinvention of familial lineages and genealogies was one of the most striking aspects of the indigenous nobility’s reaction to the challenges of colonialism. In the Andes, indigenous women likewise took up the practice of reformulating lineages, bringing together the fact that, in some regions of the northern coast of Peru and Ecuador before the conquest, women could inherit political office, with the desire of the Spanish crown 63

Karen Graubart

to regularize cacicazgo inheritance in order to limit challenges, especially in the absence of preferred direct males heirs.Those cases were resolved with the creation of female cacicas, an institution that quickly spread across the empire, even to regions where female inheritance was largely unknown before the Spanish conquest (Graubart 2007). Another fruitful path follows indigenous litigation, petitions, and testimony. Spanish administrators complained of the litigiousness of indigenous elites, who simply utilized the legal tools given them to improve their own and their communities’ positions. Indigenous petitioners, as members of the legal category of miserables, were entitled to free legal representation. They also shared legal knowledge in major urban centers. While colonial caciques have been excoriated for their role in accommodating the vicious demands of colonial rulers, they also functioned as advocates for indigenous justice.They petitioned local and royal officials for amparo or protection for their subjects; they also filed requests for rewards for their own meritorious service. For example, the cacique of Pacajes (modern Bolivia) petitioned officials in the seventeenth century to protect his community from the forced labor draft to the mines of Potosí (Choque Canqui and Glave 2012). Notably, the memoriales he sent did not simply argue against the labor but indicted the colonial economy for its deleterious effects on a community he was required to preserve. Indigenous litigation was also an act of theorization of a social world. Litigation and petitioning also reveal conflicts between community and individual interests: caciques across the Americas presented themselves as sole owners of resources that might previously have been communal or attached to an office. Such actions might be purely self-interested, or might reflect shifting ways of thinking about both the resources and the community, as shown in Don Gonzalo Taulichusco’s 1562 will: the son of the cacique who ceded Lima to Pizarro detailed how he had misused resources belonging to his community and family, and attempted to provide restitution by demanding their return and placement into new formats that might protect the community in future (Graubart 2017). Elite indigenous men also traveled to the Habsburg Court to request favors from the Crown (Puente Luna 2018; Pennock 2020). Their voyages of advocacy to and from Madrid reveal the way that Spanish colonial rule utilized a transatlantic system of literate Spanish, indigenous, and mestizo intellectuals to produce discourses about nobility, ethnicity, and law in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These were rarely attempts to produce and defend a unified Indian corporate self, but rather reflected individual strategies to access power that had important local ramifications. The very category of “Indian” was also the subject of litigation. Columbus’ voyages temporarily expanded slavery in the Mediterranean world to include indigenous inhabitants of the Americas. Through the middle of the sixteenth century, Castilian monarchs expressed ambivalence about Indian slavery, until in 1542 Charles V clarified the situation by declaring Indians his vassals and exempt from enslavement and personal service. This inaugurated a spike in litigation in Castile by men, women, and children who claimed that they were indios and falsely enslaved; nearly two hundred were successful in the courts (Van Deusen 2015). Success was predicated upon telling a compelling life narrative that defined the enslaved person as born in the Spanish Indies, and involuntarily embarked upon a transimperial or transatlantic voyage that ended in Castile. Despite brandings, suspect linguistic and cultural knowledge, physiognomy, and disempowered witnesses, many indigenous litigants crafted life stories that hewed enough to definitional expectations to convince the court. Finally, Elizabeth Hill Boone notes, “the colonial intellectuals all seem to have been men” (Ramos and Yannakakis 2014, xi). Certainly, there are studies of noble indigenous women, beginning with Maria Rostworowski’s (1989a, 1989b) landmark history of Doña Francisca Pizarro, daughter of the Spanish conquistador and Inés Huaylas, daughter of the Inca Huayna 64

Self-representation and self-governance in early Latin America

Capac. Sara Guengerich (2017) has explored the petitions for resources belonging to Doña Francisca and other Inca women, which reveal not only how gender relations were transformed under Spanish rule, but how elite women made places for themselves at the colonial table (see also Díaz 2010; Díaz and Quispe-Agnoli 2017). But Boone’s statement reflects a failure of definition as well. Women figured as healers and religious leaders, including those prosecuted under the extirpation of idolatry; many were clearly educators and ritual specialists.Women of all races and classes were also at the forefront of Catholic confraternities, arguably among the most salient social networks of the early colonial period. As the lens used to designate “intellectuals” transforms, scholars need to examine their expectations about gender and class.

Black intellectuals In contrast to the burgeoning literature on indigenous intellectuals, Black thought remains difficult to locate in early Spanish colonial worlds. Black intellectuals become more common historical subjects in the Bourbon period and into the nineteenth century, when free people of African descent found distinction in scientific and artistic circles as well as through military and commercial opportunities. But the necessary project of finding the intellectual visions of people of African descent in the early colonial world has advanced slowly. This project requires searching for texts in unexpected locations as well as making the definition of texts more elastic. Larissa Brewer-García (2019, 2020) argues that Black subjects co-produced or influenced the production of texts as early as the seventeenth century. She studies African translators for catechists in seventeenthcentury Cartagena, not only producing biographies of the men who performed the role for newly arrived African slaves, but also suggesting ways to contemplate their own analysis of Christianity. Her careful reading of the beatification hearings for the Jesuit Pedro Claver contemplates how African Christians read visual aids and then translated them to men, women, and children who had arrived as cargo from their own places of origin.This approach recreates both kinds of participants—translators and audience—as active agents, and elevates the act of translation to one of political leadership. Most stunning, perhaps, is the diary left by the Black donada or religious servant Ursula de Jesús (1604–1666) in Lima (Van Deusen 2004). A former slave who acquired a following as a mystic in the convent of Santa Clara, Ursula recorded her thoughts (with some anonymous assistance) at the request of her spiritual advisors, who characterized her remarkable transformation from frivolous to pious as a model for the humble and elite alike. Her entries record a convent world bearing the same race and class schisms as the secular one, and her own genius for managing her circumstances with cautionary tales that emerged from her visions of souls caught in purgatory. Scholars have described the lives of other exceptional Black religious figures in this period, from San Martín de Porras, a lay brother of the Dominican order in Peru who was beatified in 1837, some two hundred years after his death (Cussen 2014; Brewer-García 2019) to Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, born in Western Africa, enslaved in Puebla (Mexico), who was allowed to profess as a Carmelite nun on her deathbed in 1678 (Bristol 2007). Many of these figures are largely known to us through hagiographic or instrumental representations, such as the sketches of Madre Estephanía de San José, a saintly Black tertiary in Lima, proffered in the sermons of the extirpator Francisco de Ávila (Cussen 2005). Ávila used the example of Madre Estephanía, who pretended to be illiterate so that the elite women who invited her into their homes might read pointedly chosen texts aloud to her, as a model of conversational lay preaching and evangelization. A subsequent version of her life story erased her possession of a slave as well as her 65

Karen Graubart

friendship with a mystical woman arrested by the Inquisition, as a way to use her as a model of “nonwhite holiness.” These lives usually conform to a standard narrative although scholars sometimes read them against the grain for evidence of an outsider perspective.They also tend to reflect urban centers, where nonwhite religious figures were more common. Catholic practice can provide a way to examine what Bennett (2003) calls an “Afro-Creole consciousness.” Confraternities (cofradías) provide a fruitful opening, as one of the few colonial spaces open to groups of Black people (von Germeten 2006).These were voluntary associations of pious Catholics, who met regularly to share spiritual life, and fundraised collectively to pay for members’ funerals, care in illness, and other needs. They marched in processions during holy feast days, their spatial position within the ritual representing their place in the colonial hierarchy. Cofradías were required to have a spiritual advisor, usually a Spanish priest who guided them and oversaw their elections. Some, like the Dominican “Rosary” cofradías in Spain and Portugal, encouraged owners to bring slaves to meetings. In the Americas and Africa those heterogeneous cofradías spawned Rosary groups aimed specifically at organizing enslaved, Black, indigenous, and mixed-race parishioners (Saunders 2010). Black and indigenous Christians also formed their own cofradías, under the auspices of willing clergy. These often emerged organically—begun by a group of like-minded worshippers—and later took on racial identifications as part of their self-articulation in a competitive religious environment.The church expressed anxiety about the growing number of cofradías arising in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, setting unenforced limits on the number allowed in cities, likely reflecting concerns about Black festivities and drinking (Bowser 1974; Valerio 2020). Because cofradías elected their own leadership—men and women who directed their actions and managed their funds—they designed their own self-governance under the constraints of the clergy’s eye. In many cases, Black cofradías elected kings and queens who led their processions and other cultural practices, in addition to the official Catholic roles of mayordomo and treasurer. Many Black and mulato cofradías had short lives and heterodox practices: attention to the ways they imagined their political organization might reveal the intellectual work that underlay them (Jouve-Martín 2007). The study of secular men and women within slavery is harder to document. As Marisa Fuentes (2016) argues, archival power constructs their lives in violent, incomplete, and fragmentary ways that challenge our ability to narrate.Their names and descriptions appear in legal texts, sometimes because they used the courts to try to win freedom or improved conditions. Urban slaves, especially, benefited from access to networks of Spaniards and Indians, who presumably shared knowledge about the legal system as well as economic and social practices. Spanish courts, both civil and ecclesiastic, received people of African descent as plaintiffs and witnesses. They could also draw upon their status as miserables to call upon free lawyers and other services. Enslaved men and women effectively created law regarding slaves’ right to self-purchase (coartación) and to be sold to a new master (papel). They did so by pressing for these rights in courts (De la Fuente 2007). Enslaved peoples’ encounters with the law were, however, rarely favorable. Michelle McKinley (2016) describes how masters might verbally (or testamentarily) free men and women but de facto re-enslave them, even multiple times, given where the power of enforcement lay.The apparently common experience of promises unkept—for example, children of enslaved mothers freed at the baptismal font who continued to reside in the master’s household, effectively postponing manumission; or slaves freed under financial conditions that kept them in eternal service—meant that enslaved men and women lived in a world of rumor, insecurity, and quietly shared knowledge about their legal possibilities. It is worth asking of them the question Jennifer Morgan

66

Self-representation and self-governance in early Latin America

(2018) poses of enslaved women who gave birth against reason: were their bodily actions not the instantiation of intellectual work? Because people of African descent had no local nobility, nor did they generally enjoy corporate access to land or customary law, they could not claim a de facto intellectual class parallel to that of indigenous nobles. Nor did they often litigate as a class through any kind of leadership (for a rare example, see Graubart 2020). It is worth contemplating that long-standing groups of runaway slaves, often called palenques, sometimes ascribed royal lineage to their leaders. Whether this was in response to Spanish expectations—Castilian monarchs appointed the leader of the enslaved and free Blacks of Seville ostensibly because he was of royal birth in Africa—or because of their own narratives about their past and future is unclear. Indeed, a study of the interior workings of palenques could reveal a good deal about the imaginations of African and Africandescent intellectuals in the early colonial world (Landers 2005). Literacy, to be sure, is an even larger factor in the difficulty of identifying Black intellectuals as compared to indigenous ones. Because so few Blacks could read and write, nearly anything that emanated from their minds had to be translated into writing by a mediator of a different race and social class. Studies of wills left by a relative elite of free Black men and women in early Lima reveal that most could not even sign their names. Men who came up through military service were sometimes literate, as was Captain Francisco Duarte, leader of the Black and mulato militia, whose 1689 will noted a collection of spiritual books (Martín 2005, 64–65). But such men, like literate religious servants, were rare exceptions in the early colonial world. Scholars of colonial Afro-Latin American intellectual thought find themselves at the opening of an emerging field. New answers could come from religious archives, from creative re-reading of litigation, but also from simply asking the right question: how do we look for evidence of intellectual practice from individuals who were not simply dominated but had little access to unmediated literacy? How do we read archives constructed to marginalize their life stories in order not only to understand their experiences but contemplate their creative acts of reasoning?

Conclusion: toward a new politics of the Afro-indigenous colonial world The study of indigenous and African-descent peoples, individually and corporately, has been central to the way recent scholarship has approached the early colonial world. The “coloniality of power” has meant that Eurocentric domination, Atlantic slavery, and patriarchal authority have produced a scholarly past (and a political present) that pays little attention to those stories (Quijano 2000). Critical historians of the past few generations have worked both to tell those stories and to reveal how power functions within our archives. The result is that some fields of study have flourished. Many indigenous communities, in great part because of a clear link between contemporary politics over land practices, language, and rights, now have a vigorous and critical historical trail. Historical studies take seriously the idea that, after the conquest, indigenous elites and communities more broadly engaged in political debates and actions that produced modes of living that were not reducible to some abstract pre-Hispanic tradition, nor to raw colonial domination.They also recognize that Spanish vassalage was cemented with indigenous corporate groups rather than individuals, leaving space for the existence of vibrant indigenous politics and even indigenous legal frameworks and notions of justice. Our literature now takes indigenous self-governance and self-representation as fundamental to the way we talk about the colonial past.

67

Karen Graubart

On the other hand, people of African descent and, to a lesser degree, women of non-Spanish descent have not been centered as self-representing subjects in the same way. Histories of their lives have tended to describe their experiences, their oppression, and their extraordinary acts, but have rarely explored their epistemologies or worldviews.This is clearly a result of colonial archival practice: records reflect not what was but what mattered to those who archived them. Enslaved women exist as commodities that fetched a price, or unruly bodies that were punished rather than as thinking actors. As Fuentes (2016) has shown, exposing and naming that shortcoming is an important practice; reimagining the worlds they inhabited is another.

Works cited Adorno, Rolena. 1986. Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ávila, Francisco de. 1999. Ritos y Tradiciones de Huarochirí, edited by Gerald Taylor. Lima: IFEA – Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos. Bennett, Herman. 2003. Africans in Colonial Mexico. Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570–1640. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Benton, Lauren. 2002. Law and Colonial Cultures. Legal Regimes in World History, 1400 –1900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bhabha, Homi. 1985. “Signs Taken for Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree outside Delhi, May 1817.” Critical Inquiry 12 (1): 144–165. Bowser, Frederick P. 1974. The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524 –1650. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Brewer-García, Larissa. 2019.“Hierarchy and Holiness in the Earliest Colonial Black Hagiographies: Alonso de Sandoval and His Sources,” William and Mary Quarterly 76 (3): 477–508. ———. 2020. Beyond Babel:Translators of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bristol, Joan Cameron. 2007. Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches:Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Burns, Kathryn. 2010. Into the Archive. Writing and Power in Colonial Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2014. “Making Indigenous Archives. The Quilcacamayoc of Colonial Cuzco.” In Indigenous Intellectual: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes, edited by Yanna Yannakakis and Gabriela Ramos, 237–260. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Choque Canqui, Roberto, and Luis Miguel Glave. 2012. Mita, caciques y mitayos. Gabriel Fernández Guarache: Memoriales en defensa de los indios y debate sobre la mita de Potosí (1646 –1663). La Paz: Archivo y Biblioteca Nacionales de Bolivia. Cussen, Celia L. 2005. “The Search for Idols and Saints in Colonial Peru: Linking Extirpation and Beatification.” Hispanic American Historical Review 85 (3): 417–448. ———. 2014. Black Saint of the Americas:The Life and Afterlife of Martín de Porres. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. De la Fuente, Alejandro. 2007. “Slaves and the Creation of Legal Rights in Cuba: Coartación and Papel.” Hispanic American Historical Review 87 (4): 659–692. Díaz, Mónica. 2010. Indigenous Writings From the Convent. Negotiating Ethnic Authority in Colonial Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Díaz, Mónica, and Rocío Quispe-Agnoli, eds. 2017. Women's Negotiations and Textual Agency in Latin America, 1500 –1799. London: Routledge. Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. 1970. Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España. Barcelona: Editorial Ramón Sopena, SA. Fuentes, Marisa J. 2016. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women,Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Garibay Kintana, Ángel María. 1958. Veinte himnos sacros de los nahuas. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma. Glave, Luis Miguel. 1989. Trajinantes: Caminos indígenas en la sociedad colonial siglos XVI/XVII. Lima: Institute de Estudios Peruanos.

68

Self-representation and self-governance in early Latin America Graubart, Karen B. 2007. With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550 –1700. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2015. “Learning from the Qadi: The Jurisdiction of Local Rule in the Early Colonial Andes.” Hispanic American Historical Review 95 (2): 195–228. ———. 2017. “Shifting Landscapes: Heterogeneous Conceptions of Land Use and Land Tenure in the Lima Valley.” Colonial Latin American Review 26 (1): 62–84. ———. 2020. “Pesa más la libertad: Slavery, Legal Claims, and Afro-Latin American Intellectual History,” manuscript. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe. 1992. El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, edited by John V. Murra and Rolena Adorno. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno. Guengerich, Sara Vicuña. 2017. “Inca Women Under Spanish Rule: Probanzas and Informaciones of the Colonial Andean Elite.” In Women’s Negotiations and Textual Agency in Latin America, 1500 –1799, edited by Mónica Díaz and Rocío Quispe-Agnoli, 106–129. London: Routledge. Harrison, Regina. 2014. Sin and Confession in Colonial Peru. Spanish-Quechua Penitential Texts, 1560 –1650. Austin: University of Texas Press. Martín, José Ramón Jouve. 2005. Esclavos de la ciudad letrada. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos ———. 2007. “Public Ceremonies and Mulatto Identity in Viceregal Lima: A Colonial Reenactment of the Fall of Troy (1631).” Colonial Latin American Review 16 (2): 179–201. Kellogg, Susan. 1995. Law and the Transformation of Aztec Culture, 1500 –1700. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Landers, Jane G. 2005. “Leadership and Authority in Maroon Settlements in Spanish America and Brazil.” In Africa and the Americas: Interconnections During the Slave Trade, edited by José Curto and Renée Soulodre-La France, 173–184. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. León-Portilla, Miguel. 1959. Visión de los vencidos: relaciones indígenas de la conquista. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma. ———. 1964. El reverso de la conquista: relaciones aztecas, mayas e incas. Mexico City: J. Moritz. Lockhart, James. 1992. The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lockhart, James, Frances Berdan, and Arthur J.O. Anderson. 1986. The Tlaxcalan Actas. A Compendium of the Records of the Cabildo of Tlaxcala (1545 –1627). Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Martínez, María Elena. 2004. “The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence, and Gendered Power in Early Colonial Mexico.” William and Mary Quarterly 61 (3): 479–520. ———. 2011. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Martínez Baracs, Andrea. 2008. Un Gobierno de Indios:Tlaxcala, 1519 –1750. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Matthew, Laura. 2012. Memories of Conquest: Becoming Mexicano in Colonial Guatemala. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. McDonough, Kelly. 2014. The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico.Tucson: University of Arizona Press. McKinley, Michelle A. 2016. Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600 –1700. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Metcalf, Alida C. 2008. Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500 –1600. Austin: University of Texas Press. Monteiro, John. 1994. Negros da terra: índios e bandeirantes nas origens de São Paulo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Morgan, Jennifer L. 2018. “Partus Sequitur Ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery.” Small Axe 22 (1): 1–17. Murra, John V. 1980. The Economic Organization of the Inka State. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Ortíz, Fernando. 2002. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. Madrid: Cátedra. Pennock, Caroline Dodds. 2020. "Aztecs Abroad? Uncovering the Early Indigenous Atlantic," American Historical Review 125(3): 787–814. Powers, Karen Vieira. 1995. Andean Journeys: Migration, Ethnogenesis, and the State in Colonial Quito. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ———. 1998. “A Battle of Wills: Inventing Chiefly Legitimacy in the Colonial North Andes.” In Dead Giveaways: Indigenous Testaments of Colonial Mesoamerica and the Andes, edited by Susan Kellogg and Matthew Restall, 183–214. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.

69

Karen Graubart Puente Luna, José Carlos de la. 2016. “Guardianes de La Real Justicia: Alcaldes de Indios y Justicia Local en Los Andes.” Histórica 40 (2): 11–48. ———. 2018. Andean Cosmopolitans: Seeking Justice and Reward at the Spanish Royal Court. Austin: University of Texas Press. Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla 1 (3): 533–580. Rama, Ángel. 1984. La ciudad letrada. Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte. Ramos, Gabriela, and Yanna Yannakakis, eds. 2014. Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Restall, Matthew. 2003. “A History of the New Philology and the New Philology in History.” Latin American Research Review 38 (1): 113–134. Rostworowski de Díez Canseco, María. 1983. Estructuras andinas del poder: ideología religiosa y política. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. ———. 1989a. Costa peruana prehispánica. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. ———. 1989b. Doña Francisca Pizarro. Una Ilustre Mestiza, 1534 –1598. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Ruíz Medrano, Ethelia. 2011. Mexico’s Indigenous Communities:Their Lands and Histories, 1500 –2010. Boulder: University of Colorado Press. Sahagún, Bernardino de. 2012. Florentine codex: General history of the things of New Spain, edited by Arthur J. O Anderson and Charles E Dibble. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Saunders, A. C. de C. M. 2010. A Social History of Black Slaves and Freedmen in Portugal, 1441 –1555. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Spalding, Karen. 1973. “Kurakas and Commerce: A Chapter in the Evolution of Andean Society.” Hispanic American Historical Review 53 (4): 581–599. ———. 1984. Huarochirí, an Andean Society under Inca and Spanish Rule. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stern, Steve J. 1982. Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Sweet, James H. 2009. “Mistaken Identities? Olaudah Equiano, Domingos Álvares, and the Methodological Challenges of Studying the African Diaspora.” The American Historical Review 114 (2): 279–306. Terraciano, Kevin. 2004. The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Ñudzahui History, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Townsend, Camilla. 2007. Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Van Deusen, Nancy. 2004. The Souls of Purgatory. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ———. 2015. Global Indios.The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Varón Gabai, Rafael. 1980. Curacas y encomenderos: acomodamiento nativo en Huaraz, siglos XVI y XVII. Lima: P. L.Villanueva Von Germeten, Nicole. 2006. Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. White, Richard. 1999. The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650 –1815. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Yannakakis, Yanna. 2008. The Art of Being In-between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

70

3 MESTIZAJE AS A DISPOSITIF FOR A PARADIGM SHIFT IN COLONIAL STUDIES Laura Catelli

This chapter deals with the question of how the notion of mestizaje (miscegenation) has influenced and been influenced by the field of Latin American colonial studies, and of how it ultimately shapes our understanding of colonialism and its forms of persistence. Approaching these questions requires a working definition of mestizaje, a map of certain developments in Latin American colonial studies in relation to this notion, and an understanding of colonialism as a multifaceted problem that cuts across but also exceeds this field. With these aims in mind, mestizaje will be considered in this chapter as a dispositif, a dynamic, somewhat elastic concept that Michel Foucault introduced in The History of Sexuality Vol I. (1978) and elaborated in the later stages of his work, and for which there is no stable, closed definition.1 Though the concept has been the subject of extensive debate, there are certain aspects that Foucault himself emphasized in a 1977 interview, such as the multiplicity and heterogeneity of elements that comprise the dispositif (which include the discursive and the non-discursive), the connections and relations among them, the strategic and situated function of the resulting formation, and the various and shifting positions produced within it (Foucault 1980, 194–228). What interests me about the notion of dispositif is the possibility of examining mestizaje from transdisciplinary perspectives that could point to practices, discourses, institutions, and intersubjective relations placed in motion by Iberian colonialism, as well as the subjective, discursive, material, and practical aftermaths of this process.2 Furthermore, this approach entails developing an overview of the critical and disciplinary configuration of Latin American colonial studies and understanding that the field itself is crisscrossed by effects of what Aníbal Quijano has called the coloniality of power,3 a model of geopolitical relations sustained by a racial axis of colonial origin that has superseded the nominal end of colonial domination (2008, 181). Also, I argue that mestizaje is crucial for situating specific attributes of Iberian settler colonialism in Latin America, as well as the social, economic, and cultural relations that this system of domination set in motion. According to Lorenzo Veracini: The successful settler colonies ‘tame’ a variety of wildernesses, end up establishing independent nations, effectively repress, co-opt, and extinguish indigenous alterities, and productively manage ethnic diversity. By the end of this trajectory, they claim to be no longer settler colonial (they are putatively ‘settled’ and ‘postcolonial’ – except

71

Laura Catelli

that unsettling anxieties remain, and references to a postcolonial condition appear hollow as soon as indigenous disadvantage is taken into account). (2011, 3) In this regard, the topic of mestizaje constitutes a pivotal and somewhat overdue discussion in the context of the larger debate about the Latin American and Caribbean colonial and postcolonial experiences, which pose a specific set of historical and theoretical problems, as Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel and Carlos Jáuregui have noted (2008, 20). Also, the ongoing discussions on the coloniality of power and their emphasis on race and classification seem to run parallel to Latin American colonial studies, and would benefit from considering the extensive research on mestizaje in order to reassess it as a specific mode of racialization that exceeds racial classification, a process in itself far from transparent and systematic, as Joanne Rappaport (2014) has argued. Thus, this chapter aims to show that it is possible to shorten the distance among various lines of research and debate.The larger and main purpose of this chapter is to draw attention to the critical possibilities that a complex approach to mestizaje as a dispositif represents for a field that focuses on the colonial but, arguably ( Verdesio 2001, 633–658; Catelli 2012, 44–55), has not been entirely engaged in the larger debate on colonialism, settler colonialism, and decolonization.4 The first section of the chapter is dedicated to clarifying certain points about the idea of mestizaje that will aid in mapping the development of the field in relation to this concept. It stresses that the term mestizaje only appears toward the end of the nineteenth century, while a strategy of establishing carnal relations as well as various types of relations of kin with indigenous men and women in order to facilitate colonization can be traced back to the very first years of settlement (Rosenblat 1954, 1–2; Deagan 1996, 2004; Catelli 2010, 69–115). I am referring to Ann Laura Stoler’s expression here and of course to her study, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule, which “treats sexual matters not as a metaphor for colonial inequities but as foundational to the material terms in which colonial projects were carried out” (2002, 14). Furthermore, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui uses the expression mestizaje de sangre,“the practice of rape and the hoarding of women by encomenderos, priests, and Spanish soldiers. In this way the invaders accessed a double benefit: women’s labor (…) and the sexual services so eloquently denounced by Waman Puma” (2010, 72, my translation).The section focuses on the effects of this strategy and on making some relevant terminological and semantic nuances around mestizo and mestizaje to indicate a long-term process that involves practices as well as discourses. Many researchers in our field have studied these aspects of mestizaje, in a diversity of contexts. Even though it is impossible to account for such a vast bibliographical corpus, and also not my aim, the second section offers a comparative review of relevant works about mestizaje as well as major critical directions formulated from some of the disciplines in the field. In the third section, I draw attention to political aspects at stake in the construction of mestizaje as an object of study. I discuss Rivera Cusicanqui’s claim that mestizaje is intrinsic to internal colonialism5 in the present and relate it to my own model of mestizaje as a dispositif. I also explore the idea that mestizaje as a dispositif can be deployed in Latin American colonial studies toward the decolonization of the field by promoting analytics and a critique of postcolonial epistemic and power dynamics that is still lacking in our field of studies.

The mestizaje strategy and its effects In this chapter I use Foucault’s idea of strategy broadly as mechanisms used in relations of power (Castro 2011, 143), to give visibility to the carnal mechanisms of domination of the early stages of conquest as it thrust forward in different locations. In doing so, I wish to highlight the carnal 72

Mestizaje as a dispositif for a paradigm shift in colonial studies

aspect of mestizaje as a strategic function of Iberian settler colonialism. Carnal mestizaje is a different (though related) phenomenon from what became a frequent topic in colonial written and visual sources, or from what Serge Gruzinski has called “mestizo phenomena” (2002, 62–63).The strategy of establishing carnal relations with indigenous women to facilitate colonization can be traced to written sources from the first decade of European presence in the New World, relating to the Spanish and Portuguese enterprises (Catelli 2010, 69–133). As I argued elsewhere (Catelli 2010, 133–136), the deployment of a strategy of concubinage, marriage, and subject/bodies in contact set off an insurmountable chain of discursive, practical, and subjective effects. From el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios reales de los incas (1609) to eighteenth century casta painting, lo mestizo6 irrupts and disrupts modern imaginaries and challenges the fixedness of European epistemologies. Mestizos become ambivalent actors and subjects of enunciation in colonial situations.They are also one of the most frequent topics of a wide range of European and American discourses that extends well beyond the colonial period. The earlier occurrences of the terms mestizo and mestiza in the New World are telling signs of the emergence of discursive effects of the carnal conquest. Dated as appearing in the wills of conquistadors in the 1530s, they substitute the expression “hijo de español habido en india” (“son of a Spaniard conceived in an Indian woman,” my translation) (Olaechea Labayen 1992, 269).Yet, the original, Peninsular meaning of mestizo continued to be associated with cattle and other animals of unknown origin, a type of semantic displacement in racial classification that Javier Irigoyen García has defined as “zootechnic” (2008, 34–43). Its persistence is reflected in Covarrubias’s definition of mestizo in Tesoro de la lengua (1611). Even though in the colonies the term began to be used to refer to the offspring of Spanish men and indigenous women, a derogatory and dehumanizing connotation was carried in the transatlantic passage, along with the idea of uncertainty of origin and illegitimate birth. From a European and creole perspective, mestizo was almost synonymous with bastard, and connoted an unknown and potentially bad caste. There were also negative indigenous views about mestizaje and mestizos. The Yarovilca writer Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, written in Perú in 1615, manifests a deeply negative view of the effects of Spanish colonial administration and of sexual relations between Spanish men and Inca women (Catelli 2010, 181–196; Quispe-Agnoli 2017). On his arrival in Lima, he describes seeing “muy muchas yndias putas cargadas de mesticillos y de mulatos” (“very many Indian whores carrying little mestizos and mulatos”). He notes that even those who are married,“andan con españoles y negros” (“go about with Spaniards and blacks”), or prefer prostitution to marriage. Moreover, Guaman Poma laments that the Indians are not multiplying, as a result of this profound alteration to the Inca social order (Ayala 1615, 1138, translations mine). Indeed, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, mestizo was construed as a social condition that endangered the system of differences and hierarchies that attempted to separate the colonial population into a República de españoles and a República de indios while subjecting blacks to slavery. María Elena Martínez defines this process as taking place by the middle of the sixteenth century, resulting in a “framework which consisted of two separate but interrelated polities or ‘republics’, the Indian and the Spanish” (2008, 91).While Martínez notes that in New Spain “efforts to maintain a strict segregation between the two republics failed, the dual model of social organization had long-term social consequences” (2008, 91–92). Rossana Barragán (1992) has written about the mestizo or cholo sector in the Andean colonial space as a “Third Republic.” Contact across boundaries continued to occur, and colonial authorities attempted to contain mixture and its effects through legal dispositions that also aimed to organize colonial space (Carrera 2003; Meléndez 2009; Nemser 2017). While ineffective, these efforts produced a series of classifications in the attempt to control a population that was perceived as increasingly unruly and menacing to the colonial social 73

Laura Catelli

order. In his Política indiana (1648) the Spanish jurist Juan Solórzano y Pereira referred to mestizos as a growing and problematic sector of the colonial population (248). According to him, mestizos should be kept away from indigenous areas because of their continued abuses toward the indigenous population, and recommended that they be confined to separate areas. Solórzano used mestizo as a broad category that included the initial Spanish and indigenous mixture as well as mulatos and zambaigos, but the crucial distinction within his grouping was between those of legitimate and illegitimate birth. For the jurist, the “viciousness” of mestizos was directly linked to the immoral conditions of their conception and birth, so he argued that mestizos of legitimate birth should enjoy privileges that illegitimates should not. By the end of the seventeenth century, the mestizo group of the colonial population, which included different mixtures, was equated with a mob of plebs, as Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora expressed with alarm in his account of the 1692 Mexico City riots (Sigüenza 1984, 113). According to Melo Ruiz, Sigüenza’s account construed Indian presence in the viceregal capital as a social and economic problem, while the emergence of black and mixed groups were perceived as contestatory of colonial rule (2013, 129). The phenomenon was not exclusive to New Spain and Perú. Patricio Lepe-Carrión’s study shows that in eighteenth century Chile mestizos were construed as “the most deprecated and discriminated human conglomerate of Chilean society” (2017, 256, my translation), during the Bourbon Reforms. For Lepe-Carrión the treatment extended to mestizos or castas was not plainly an administrative effect but a “sociohistorical construction based on ‘race’ that had developed since the fifteenth century and sedimented the relation vagabundaje/ mestizaje in the eighteenth century thanks to enlightened scientific and philosophical debates” (2017, 254, my translation). While these new classifications proliferated as discursive aftereffects of the mestizaje strategy and continued to branch out as colonial populations grew, the term mestizaje was not used until the end of the nineteenth century, in the context of the eugenics movement.The earliest instance I have located is in a text by Brazilian anthropologist Nina Rodrigues, written in French (Borges 1993), in dialogue with the French branch of eugenics. In Spanish, though the idea of racial mixture is present in the Mexican anthropologist Manuel Gamio’s Forjando patria (1916), he uses the concepts of fusion and amalgamation, not mestizaje. Its first use beyond physical anthropology occurs in José Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica: misión de la raza iberoamericana (1925) (Catelli 2010; Zermeño-Padilla 2008), where cultural, ethnic, and aesthetic levels of meaning are added to the term (Catelli 2010, 55–71). I am interested in these terminological and semantic nuances7 as inflection points to the configuration of a tentative map for an archaeo-genealogical approach to the larger process known as mestizaje.8 Archeo-genealogical perspectives illuminate aspects of colonial and postcolonial racial formations that our post-positivist perspective may otherwise miss.These approaches also reveal that a colonial racial imaginary that involved discourses and practices and revolved around the process we know as mestizaje developed gradually after carnal relations took place among subjects of different races in situations of contact (Pratt 1992; Deagan 1996, 2004). Yet, the colonial racial imaginary known as mestizaje continues to have influence in the racial imaginaries of the present. Its use in a myriad of situations (Gruzinski 2002, 19), has led to certain confusion regarding what the term means, how it arose and developed discursively in different contexts, from biology and physical anthropology to cultural anthropology, social history, ethnohistory, literature and art studies, and so on. Furthermore, for Antonio Cornejo Polar using the term entailed the risk of missing a “dense layer of signification” (Cornejo Polar 1998, 7–8, translation mine) regarding conceptions of Latin American literature and culture. From this perspective, many questions remain.Why has mestizaje suffered so many appropriations? What is at stake in its use as shorthand for our colonial pasts? How do those appropriations affect the 74

Mestizaje as a dispositif for a paradigm shift in colonial studies

comprehension and lived experience of our postcolonial present? And the question that hovers over this chapter: what role has the field of colonial Latin American studies played in these constructions of mestizaje?

Mapping mestizaje as an object of study As we know, the first works about mestizaje were not critically inspired. For example,Vasconcelos’s La raza cósmica (1925) is a celebration of the domineering role of white civilization in what is portrayed as a teleological process of fusion. Three decades later Angel Rosenblat wrote about mestizaje as a sociohistorical process, highlighting its centrality through a meticulous rendition of historical sources. Rosenblat’s La población indígena y el mestizaje en América (1954) organized the colonial archive to place mestizaje as pivotal to the sociological, political, and cultural development and future of Latin American populations. It could be considered a transitional work between Vasconcelos’s celebration of mestizaje as the highest stage of physical, spiritual, and aesthetic human evolution in La raza cósmica (1925, 1948), and a decisive historiographical turn. Rosenblat’s positivist treatment of a rich corpus of primary sources results in a well-structured account of mestizaje that, like Vasconcelos’s, persists in popular cultural and critical imaginaries to this day. In the Social Sciences, as Zermeño-Padilla observes, the topic of mestizaje was introduced following the projects of international organisms and European academic institutions.9 The Swedish historian Magnus Mörner was perhaps one of its most “fervent proponents” (ZermeñoPadilla 2008, 80). Mörner (1961) approached racial mixture in the Iberian colonies as a historiographical and methodological problem and mapped contributions to the study of mestizaje up to that point (Richard Konetzke (1953), Angel Rosenblat (1954), George Kubler (1952), John P. Gillin (1949), and Zermeño-Padilla (2008, 80)). The historian Richard Konetzke (1962) cautioned that the legislation written in the Peninsula did not necessarily reflect the reality of contact in the process of conquest and colonization in the New World, questioning approaches that took instructions and other official documents as factual sources for grasping certain aspects related to the process of mestizaje. Mörner was also emphatic about the difficulties of writing a history of mestizaje (1962) and also noted a gap between the vocabulary associated with mestizaje, which Rosenblat studied,10 and its actual use in the colonies (Mörner 1967, 59). Mörner and Konetzke’s contributions resulted in a Latin Americanist approach to a problem that until recently had been addressed mostly within the confines of national or regional (Rosenblat 1954, 191) discursivities and imaginaries. Their work placed a question mark on the possibility of a narrow definition of mestizaje and inscribed the need for a comparative approach to the phenomenon as well as to methodological challenges tied to the study of related sources. Ethnohistorical perspectives in the seventies added a new level to studies on mestizaje by questioning historiographies dominated by European subjects, sources, and methods. Inspired by the anthropologist Miguel León Portilla’s compilation of indigenous relations of the conquest in Mexico, Visión de los vencidos. Relaciones indígenas de la conquista (1959), Nathan Wachtel’s Vision des Vaincus (1971) aimed to produce a shift of perspective on the process of conquest in Peru, through the confluence of historiography and ethnology, a “double methodological approach” (25). In what Guillaume Boccara has recently called “a postcolonial or subaltern critique avant la lettre” (2012b, 41, my translation), ethnohistorical perspectives reconfigured the narrative of mestizaje as one of conflict among multiple agents.Yet, as Boccara has pointed out recently, the field of ethnohistory has not had a level of influence comparable to other critical historiographies (2012a, 142). For this reason, the work of Rossana Barragán (1990), Marisol de la Cadena (2000, 2007), and Rivera Cusicanqui (2010) merits special mention, as over the last decades these authors have 75

Laura Catelli

constructed a methodological perspective based on a plurality of subjective points of view and intersectional agencies, in colonial and postcolonial processes of mestizaje in the Andes. In the seventies and eighties critical gender and sexuality perspectives began engaging with mestizaje, but because of the field’s primary focus on lettered mestiza and creole women (Martínez-San Miguel 1999; Burns 2007) the experiences of indigenous and black women that had no access to writing were, for the most part (Silverblatt 1987), ignored. In some ways, mestizaje was construed without naming indigenous and black women, their bodies, and experiences, except to tell tales of foundational national romances, as Doris Sommer (1991) called them. Histories of conquest and colonization were “cleansed” (Bolaños 2002, 25) of sexuality and gender as factors in the social, material, and political articulation of Iberian settler colonialism. In this context, though situated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and not really focused on early mestizaje,Verena Stolcke’s Racismo y sexualidad en la Cuba colonial (1974) represents a groundbreaking work that showed that interracial marriage and concubinage practices in Cuba were often in tension with colonial legislation that attempted to control mixture. In Stolcke’s work mestizaje refers to interracial gender and sexual relations and practices, as well as a range of patriarchal institutional discourses and mechanisms that were deployed to control women’s bodies in Cuba. Stolcke’s most remarkable achievement was to understand the dynamics by which social inequality and sexual values operated as terms of the same relation (Stolcke 1974, 33). Her study’s focus on Cuba also decentered a tendency to approach mestizaje as a European-indigenous relation, by acknowledging the region’s black population and the impact of slavery and abolition as parts of the mestizaje equation. Stolcke’s book also addressed questions about the colonial caste system, as part of a line of research that elucidates the dynamics and effects of the mestizaje strategy upon colonial governmentality and social mobility. Furthermore, these studies about the Spanish American caste system reveal how different sectors of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century colonial society produced and sustained hierarchical differences through a discourse predicated on a system of classification and an ideology of blood purity (Kuznesof 1995; Martínez 2008; Twinam 2015; Lepe-Carrión 2017). New approaches, not precisely to mestizaje but to mestizo discourse and subjectivity, arise in the field of Literary colonial studies during the eighties, when reflections on Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios reales de los Incas (1609) direct their focus to the relation between Garcilaso’s mestizo condition, his role as language and cultural translator, and the rhetorical characteristics of his work. Zamora’s studies (1987, 1988) could be seen as part of a transition from traditional literary approaches to colonial discourse analysis.11 Almost ten years later, José Antonio Mazzotti’s Coros mestizos del Inca Garcilaso (1996) develops the notion of a mestizo writing subject that is historically situated and “involves the reciprocal relation with the discourse that he elaborates and at the same time, elaborates and configures him” (18, my translation). Mazzotti analyzes the Comentarios to focus on the textual configuration of a mestizo discourse, where the writing subject appears as interpreter of the different cultural traditions that circulated during the conquest (Mazzotti 1996, 18). Mazzotti’s precision regarding what the analysis of mestizo discourse involves (and what it does not) appears as a gesture aimed at refocusing literary colonial studies. His emphasis on producing a discursive analysis of a mestizo “text” that incorporates contributions from the fields of history, anthropology, ethnohistory, and Andean iconography (Mazzotti 1996, 28–29), allow him to recognize the presence of sources of the Quechua oral tradition that make the Comentarios an example of “choral writing” (Mazzotti 1996, 34) and a historically situated example of mestizo discourse.12 Most importantly, Mazzotti’s work theorized mestizo discourse as defined not by an ontological mestizo but by the specific social, cultural, and historical contingency of a first generation mestizo writing subject, thus producing a conceptual mobilization of otherwise fixed or even reified (Catelli 2017, 91–92) notions of colonial ethnoracial identities. 76

Mestizaje as a dispositif for a paradigm shift in colonial studies

The initiation of a larger debate about colonial ethnoracial identities and relations coincides with studies in the discipline of art history and the larger field of visual studies on eighteenth century casta painting in New Spain. In the late eighties, art historians began to examine one of the “most potent expressions” (Katzew 2004, 204) of the casta system. The series of studies on casta painting begins with Maria Concepción García Saíz’s first complete cataloging (1989). These studies revised the respective literary and visual cannons to inscribe mestizo and criollo works as foundational, both because they were produced by New World subjects and because of their formal characteristics.They situated literary and visual works from the colonial period that were produced by mestizos or criollos in a cannon that otherwise excluded them.13 Subsequent studies shifted their focus to the problem of colonial identities and how they were construed visually in articulation with colonial bodies and spaces, and what those constructions suggested about the casta society that resulted from Iberian colonialism. In dialogue with previous studies that reflected upon the function of casta painting (García Sáiz 1989; Estrada de Gerlero 1994), but leaning toward interdisciplinary semiotic analysis, Magali Carrera (2003) explored the genre’s representation of ambiguous, mestizo colonial bodies in terms of a regime of visibility that expressed colonial anxieties about a population that became difficult to order and classify. Her study teased out the dynamic relations between the paintings (which she considered to be in line with the realist visual regime of the eighteenth century), and legal, literary, and religious documents. Carrera did not entirely focus on mestizaje, but working with visuality, bodies, and space as crucial categories in her analysis allowed her to claim that “casta paintings do not illustrate race but instead locate it in the intersection of certain physical, economic, and social spaces of late colonial Mexico” (2003, 38). In her work, Ilona Katzew (2004) revised eighteenth-century colonial ideas about race under the influence of illustrated thought and the ethnographic gaze (2004, 63), and their imbrication with casta ideology. Her work foregrounds the prevalence of racial mixture as a topic of casta painting and argues that the genre was constructed “as a progression of images recording the process of mestizaje, or race mixing” (2004, 5). Studies about casta painting have been essential to comprehend the role that written and visual discourses on mestizaje, degeneration, blood purity, and whiteness have had in the configuration of politically and culturally dominant ethnoracial identities during the eighteenth century. When one looks at how the field of colonial studies has construed mestizaje as an object of interdisciplinary study, it becomes evident that there are multiple facets to be considered. The map I presented here suggests that mestizaje has mostly been studied by privileging partial elements, depending on disciplinary locus of enunciation, sometimes combining methodological approaches with discourse analysis and subaltern critical perspectives, among others. But analyzing mestizaje as a racial formation (Omi and Winant 1994) in the long duration entails combining multiple levels of analysis, that involve subjective, relational, and transdisciplinary approaches, “where disciplines work through each other” (Gordon 2014, 87). Furthermore, what is interesting about approaching mestizaje as a dispositive, beyond the multiplicity of elements this entails, is the possibility to explore Foucault’s own question (1980, 194–228) about the nature of the relations among the discursive and non-discursive elements involved. This question could prompt a shift in disciplinary terms by asking about those relations that become blind spots of disciplinary rigor, where the multiple effects of mestizaje reproduce and sustain coloniality.What is the point of understanding mestizaje as a complex phenomenon that created hierarchical and racist social dynamics if we don’t examine the forces and patterns by which those hierarchies continue to be sustained?14 Let me illustrate these last points by mentioning a case study of my own (Catelli 2012).When researching casta painting in relation to emerging discourses about mestizaje, I was surprised by the fact that the vast majority of casta painters were criollos, though in various studies they are not 77

Laura Catelli

always identified as such.This detail is indirectly noted by Katzew (2004) in relation to Francisco Clapera, “the only known Spaniard to have painted a series of castas” (26), in an important chapter of her book that describes the configuration of the guild system in New Spain. Though Katzew links the depiction of the castas with expressions of criollo pride (63–110), her study, as previous ones, upholds an art history-focused perspective that explores the visual genre’s consolidation in formal and thematic terms, in connection with the sociocultural contexts in which the paintings were produced and circulated. In general, casta painting has been approached as discourse, and analyzed to tease out what it may be telling us about colonial conceptions of racial mixture, through visual representation and a series of formal and thematic characteristics. But what about the specific institutional context of the painters, disciples, and professors who conformed a mostly criollo group of males who, through certain practices (which included but were not limited to casta painting), pursued influence and recognition in colonial society? Three attempts were made by guild groupings of criollo painters who developed the casta genre to obtain such recognition, spread out throughout three generations, under Juan Rodríguez Juárez, José de Ibarra, and Miguel Cabrera (Katzew 2004, 9–26). Furthermore, documents related to these academies show that criollo painters promoted their own internal system of discrimination, especially toward afromestizos, who were barred from studying art (Couto 1995, 112–113; Catelli 2012, 157–158). It is not a minor detail that the development of the genre of casta painting and the foundations of successive art academies (which were never officially recognized by the Crown), occurred simultaneously. The particular socio-identitary condition of the painters in the colonial casta system (since the eighteenth century criollos have become increasingly obsessed with blood purity and whiteness) seems related to the construction of the ethnoracial others’ difference in the hierarchical imaginary that can be seen in casta painting.What does it mean that hierarchical, segregative racial imaginaries articulated both the first criollo visual genre and the institutional dynamics behind the process surrounding the foundation of the first academia de artes, later the Escuela Nacional Preparatoria? Approaching mestizaje as a dispositive entails analyzing casta painting, not exclusively in discursive but also in extradiscursive terms. This is not a minor distinction, as what is at stake is the possibility to analyze the constitution of mestizaje as a discursive formation in its junctures with processes of the extradiscursive order,15 such as socioracial dynamics in a given institutional space. This change of perspective foregrounds how racial imaginaries were instituted and reproduced through institutional practices, which have not been the subject of systematic critical study in colonial studies. The closing section of this chapter articulates these observations with the political and decolonizing potential of approaching mestizaje as a dispositive in the field of Latin American colonial studies.

Concluding remarks and critical considerations on mestizaje as an object of study To conclude, I want to insist on critical and political aspects of mestizaje that could be explored in articulation with the field of colonial studies. In her essay “Mestizaje colonial andino: una hipótesis de trabajo” (2010), the Bolivian and Aymara sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui begins by defining mestizaje as an axial phenomenon of colonial origin that continues to structure relations in contemporary Bolivian society. Rivera Cusicanqui’s reflections go against the grain of the legacy of mestizaje, which she considers to be a political concept that has produced a homogeneous cultural identity while concealing and reinforcing the exclusions, self-exclusions, and segregation of casta society (2010, 35–36). She identifies three cycles, the colonial, liberal, populist, and a neoliberal “epilogue,” that coexist in the present and may be perceived as diachronic 78

Mestizaje as a dispositif for a paradigm shift in colonial studies

contradictions.These cycles also manifest as “habitus16 and collective behaviors that are grounded in non-discursive spheres” (2010, 71, translation mine).Through her critique of mestizaje, Rivera Cusicanqui revises González Casanova’s definition of internal colonialism, and claims that the discourse of mestizaje is not superstructural but strategic, as it is deployed in the forging of identities and imaginaries (2010, 116). Rivera’s claim that mestizaje is an ongoing process that is still connected with the carnal or blood mestizaje of the conquest and involves present discourses, practices, and behaviors is compatible with the idea of mestizaje as a dispositif I propose here. Moreover, both her definition and the dispositif model highlight the (subjective) perceptions and discourses that have constructed and reformulated mestizaje over and over, instituting it in diverse and unexpected spaces. Even though Rivera Cusicanqui’s critique of the discourse of mestizaje pertains mostly to its circulation and influence in sociopolitical and cultural life in Bolivia, I would like to extend her observations to the disciplinary construction of mestizaje in the larger field of Latin American colonial studies that I outlined in the previous section. I am following a line of argumentation Alejandro de Oto and I developed (2018) that claims that internal colonialism functions as a type of spatiality that reveals what Angel Rama called “the cultural functions of power structures” (1998, 32, my translation) of the lettered city. In that capacity, critical reflections on internal colonialism can enable discussions on the ways in which a given theoretical domain (colonial studies in this case) can be affected by those who wander through, produce, and reproduce said domain (Catelli and de Oto 2018). This type of dynamic is made even clearer by considering Cornelius Castoriadis’s notion of the instituted imaginary.17 Elsewhere I have proposed the notion of the racial imaginary (Catelli 2017, 96–97) in order to tease out the articulations of discursive and symbolic racialization with other aspects such as subjectivity, institutions, corporeality, and spatiality (Amuchástegui 2008; Catelli 2013; Nemser 2017), in the long duration of coloniality. The point here is that the disciplinary discourses that have constructed mestizaje as an object of study in Latin American colonial studies are themselves part of the postcolonial, racial imaginary dynamic and play a highly relevant role in instituting mestizaje and its effects. I am convinced that the field of colonial studies could give deeper consideration to the political intricacies posed by the study of mestizaje. I want to insist on the decolonizing potential of research conducted in this field. Seen as a dispositif, mestizaje entails discourses, practices, institutions, and the relations among them, therefore demanding a multi-level, transdisciplinary approach capable of showing a variety of elements as well as the forces that drive their articulation and capacity to persist. My contention here has been that mestizaje as a dispositif can be deployed in the field of colonial studies toward its decolonization by promoting analytics not just of mestizaje as strategy, discourse, or subjective process, as segmented and even reified categories of study. Foucault’s emphasis on the nature of the relations among a diversity of elements of the dispositif shifts our questions from mestizaje as an object of study to the epistemic, subjective, and power relations that Iberian settler colonialism and its lettered city set into motion. Not that analytics of power in itself implies a process of decolonization, but it does further transdisciplinarity by involving the relations among discourse (in a larger sense), practices of subjectification, and interrelated imaginary, institutional formations. By going against the grain of what Lewis Gordon has called “disciplinary decadence,” analyses that engage transdisciplinarity and question the effects of how a given discipline constructs its objects of study, ultimately producing a “teleological suspension of discipline,” are to be considered in their decolonizing potential (Gordon 2014, 86–87). This observation is meant as an interpellation to those who, from the field of Latin American colonial studies, have contributed to constructing the process of mestizaje as an object of study that, for better or worse, continues to configure our perceptions of the colonial experience and 79

Laura Catelli

our postcolonial lives. In that capacity, the work on mestizaje that has been done in colonial studies also holds many keys to question a dispositif that continues to reproduce coloniality through the dynamics of internal colonialism. By recognizing their own role in the workings of the mestizaje dispositif, scholars of colonial studies could still produce a shift of paradigm toward decolonization.We just have to be willing to acknowledge the larger, political implications of our work.

Notes 1 Dispositif is habitually translated into English as “apparatus,” though some have claimed there to be relevant distinctions between these two terms. For Lambert (2016), Foucault uses dispositif to avoid the sense of (state) structure apparatus, from Althusser’s definition. In this chapter I am also making a distinction between dispositif and apparatus and using the former throughout. 2 I have elaborated on mestizaje as a dispositif of coloniality in my own work (Catelli 2010, 57–68, 133– 136; 2017, 98–102). Stoler (1995) offers a careful analysis of the implications of considering Foucault’s work in the context of colonial studies. Katzer (2010) makes the argument for mestizaje as a dispositif in nineteenth and twentieth-century Argentina, though in her analysis the term dispositif runs closer to defining a specific biopolitical apparatus of the nation state. 3 The concept has been developed in Quijano (2008, 181–224); Castro-Gómez (2008, 259–285); Lander (2000), Maldonado Torres (2008); and Mignolo (2000), among others. 4 See Klor de Alva (1995) and Veracini (2011) for distinctions and implications for decolonization. 5 The category of internal colonialism has been used in different contexts and should be considered locally specific. In Latin America, it was introduced by C. Wright Mills in Brazil in 1960 (Quintero 2012), where it continued to be developed by Cardoso de Oliveira (1978); in Mexico it is introduced by González Casanova (1963), who recently redefined the concept through the idea that “States of colonial and imperial origin and their dominant classes reproduce and conserve colonial relations with minorities and colonized ethnicities to the interior of their political borders” (2006, 416, my translation); see also Stavenhagen (1963) in Mexico; Rivera Cusicanqui (2010) and Tapia (2014) in Bolivia; Eremites de Oliveira (2015) in Brazil. For a detailed overview of internal colonialism in Latin America, see Torres Guillén (2014); on González Casanova see de Oto and Catelli (2018), who offer a critical overview and also consider the perspectives of Fanon, Mignolo, and Rivera Cusicanqui. 6 I am using this expression in Spanish, which translates roughly as “that which is mestizo,” to indicate a spectrum of effects of the mestizaje strategy so wide that it cannot be named specifically as subjects, discourses, identities, imaginaries, etc., without being reductive. 7 For careful distinctions among terms like casta, raza, mestizo, and castizo and their pertinence to the formation of sociopolitical imaginaries in New Spain and Chile, see Araya-Espinoza (2014, 53–77) and Burns (2007). 8 I am thinking of works by Castro-Gómez (2005), Lepe-Carrión (2017), Martínez (2008), Stoler (2002), Young (1995),Vainfas (1989), and my own (Catelli 2010). 9 Such as the Pan American Institute of Geography and History (PAIGH) of the Organization of American States, or the Institute of Latin American Studies at Stockholm University. 10 Alvar (1987) continued these studies decades later, commissioned by the Real Academia Española. 11 Rolena Adorno’s article “Reconsidering Colonial Discourse for Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spanish America” (1993) is an illuminating piece that teases out a series of terminological and disciplinary nuances in anthropological, historical, and literary colonial studies that are relevant for understanding the configuration of what I’ve called the extended field of colonial studies here. 12 Mazzotti’s is an interesting, perhaps indirect response to Adorno’s concern, expressed a few years earlier, that “One of our problems today is that there are hopelessly many disciplinary and subdisciplinary conversations going on (...) We are always on the lookout for what can serve as a lingua franca.‘Colonial discourse’ strikes me as such a tool (...)” (1993, 140). 13 See Adorno (1988) for a discussion of this problem. 14 Because mestizaje places a necessary focus on the contact of bodies and their control, as well as racialization and heteronormativity as a central factor in colonial and postcolonial power dynamics, it advances the problem of colonized, gendered, sexualized, and racialized bodies as part of those relations. Here we must ask, should we not revise the ways in which the heteronormative matrix of the mestizaje dispositif inflects upon methodological (Martínez 2016) and critical perspectives? 15 For a detailed distinction see Lijterman (2017).

80

Mestizaje as a dispositif for a paradigm shift in colonial studies 16 “For a structuring structure, which organizes practices and their perception of practices” (Bourdieu 1984, 170). 17 Basically, “The elementary and irreducible capacity of evoking images” (Castoriadis 1975, 127) mediates the fluid relation between institutional and social life.

Works cited Adorno, Rolena. 1988. “Nuevas perspectivas en los estudios literarios coloniales hispanoamericanos.” In “Historia, Sujeto Social y Discurso Poético en la Colonia,” edited by Mabel Moraña, special issue of Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 14 (28): 11–28. ———. 1993. “Reconsidering Colonial Discourse for Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spanish America.” Latin American Research Review 28 (3): 135–145. Alvar, Manuel. 1987. Léxico del mestizaje en Hispanoamérica. Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica Amuchástegui, Rodrigo Hugo. 2008. “Michel Foucault y la visoespacialidad.” PhD diss., Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. Araya-Espinoza, Alejandra. 2014. “¿Castas o razas?: imaginario sociopolítico y cuerpos mezclados en la América colonial. Una propuesta desde los cuadros de castas.” In Al otro lado del cuerpo. Estudios biopolíticos en América Latina, compiled by Hilderman Cardona Rodas and Zandra Pedraza Gómez, 53–77. Bogota: Ediciones Uniandes. Barragán, Rossana. 1990. Espacio urbano y dinámica étnica. La paz en el siglo XIX. La Paz: HISBOL. ———. 1992. “Entre polleras, lliqllas y ñañaqas: los mestizos y la emergencia de la tercera república´.” In Etnicidad, economía y simbolismo en los Andes, edited by Silvia Arze, Rossana Barragán, and Laura Escobari, 85–127. La Paz: Institut Français d’Études Andines, HISBOL, Sociedad Boliviana de Historia. Boccara, Guillaume. 2012a. “Qué es lo ‘etno’ en etnohistoria? La vocación crítica de los estudios etnohistóricos y los nuevos objetos de lucha.” Memoria Americana 20 (1): 35–181. ———, ed. 2012b. Colonización, resistencia y mestizaje en las Américas (Siglos XVI–XX). Quito: Abya Yala. Bolaños, Álvaro Félix. 2002. “On the Issues of Academic Colonization and Responsibility when Reading and Writing About Colonial Latin America Today.” In Colonialism Past and Present. Reading and Writing About Colonial Latin America Today, edited by Álvaro Félix Bolaños and Gustavo Verdesio, 19–50. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Borges, Dain. 1993. “‘Puffy, Ugly, Slothful and Inert’: Degeneration in Brazilian Social Thought, 1880– 1940.” Journal of Latin American Studies 25 (2): 235–256. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Burns, Kathryn. 2007. “Desestabilizando la raza.” In Formaciones de Indianidad. Articulaciones raciales, mestizaje y nación en América Latina, edited by Marisol de la Cadena, 35–54. Colombia: Envión. Cardoso de Oliveira, R. 1978. A sociologia do Brasil indígena. Brasília: Editora UNB. Carrera, Magalí. 2003. Imagining Identity in New Spain. Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin: University of Texas Press. Castoriadis, Cornelius. (1975) 1997. The Imaginary Institution of Society. Translated by Kathleen Blamey. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press. Castro, Edgardo. 2011. Diccionario Foucault.Temas, conceptos y autores. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editores. Castro-Gómez, Santiago. 2005. La hybris del punto cero. Ciencia, raza e Ilustración en la Nueva Granada (1750 –1816). Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. ———. 2008. “(Post)coloniality for Dummies: Latin American Perspectives on Modernity, Coloniality, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge.” In Coloniality at Large. Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, edited by Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui, 259–285. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Catelli, Laura. 2010. “Arqueología del mestizaje.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. ———. 2012. “Pintores criollos, pintura de castas y colonialismo interno: los discursos raciales en las artes visuales de la Nueva España del periodo virreinal tardío.” Cuadernos del CILHA 13: 147–175. ———. 2013. “La ciudad letrada y los estudios coloniales: perspectivas descoloniales desde la ‘ciudad real.’” Vanderbilt E-Journal of Luso-Hispanic Studies 9: 56–76. ———. 2017. “Lo racial como dispositivo y formación imaginaria relacional.” Revista Intersticios de la Política y la Cultura. Intervenciones Latinoamericanas 6: 89–117. Catelli, Laura, and Alejandro de Oto, 2018. “Sobre colonialismo interno y subjetividad. Notas para un debate.” Tabula Rasa (28): 229–255. https://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=39656104010.

81

Laura Catelli Cornejo Polar, Antonio. 1998. “Mestizaje e hibridez. Los riesgos de las metáforas. Apuntes.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 24 (47): 7–11. Couto, José Bernardo. 1995. Diálogo sobre la historia de la pintura en México. Mexico City: CONACULTA. Covarrubias y Orozco, Sebastián. 1611. Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. Madrid, ES: Luis Sanchez. http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/del-origen-y-principio-de-la-lengua-castellana-oromance-que-oy-se-vsa-en-espana-compuesto-por-el--0/html/ De la Cadena, Marisol. 2000. Indigenous Mestizos:The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991. Chapel Hill: Duke University Press. ———. 2007. Formaciones de indianidad: articulaciones raciales, mestizaje y nación en América Latina. Popayan: Envión. Deagan, Kathleen. 1996. “Colonial Transformations: Euro-American Genesis in the Early SpanishAmerican Colonies.” Journal of Anthropological Research 52 (2): 135–160. ———. 2004.“Reconsidering Taino Social Dynamics after Spanish Conquest: Gender and Class in Culture Contact Studies.” American Antiquity 69 (4): 597–626. Eremites de Oliveira, Jorge. 2015. “Arqueologia de contrato, colonialismo interno e povos indigenas no Brasil.” Amazônica: Revista de Antropologia 7 (2): 354–374. Estrada de Gerlero, Elena Isabel. 1994. “Las pinturas de castas, imágenes de una sociedad variopinta.” México en el mundo de las colecciones de arte. Nueva España, 2 vols. Mexico City: Grupo Azabache. Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History of Sexuality,Vol 1. New York:Vintage. ———. 1980. “Confession of the Flesh (1977).” In Power/Knowledge Selected Interviews and Other Writings, edited by Colin Gordon, 194–228. New York: Pantheon Books. Gamio, Manuel. 1916. Forjando Patria. México, D.F.: Porrúa García Sáiz, María Concepción. 1989. Las castas mexicanas. Un género pictórico americano. Milan, IT: Olivetti. Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca. (1609) 1943. Comentarios reales de los Incas, edited by Ángel Rosenblat. Buenos Aires: Emecé. Gillin, John P. 1949. “Mestizo America.” In Most of the World, edited by Ralph Linton, 156–211. New York: Columbia University Press. González Casanova, Pablo. 1963. “Sociedad plural, colonialismo interno y desarrollo.” América Latina: Revista del Centro Latinoamericano de Investigaciones en Ciencias Sociales,VI (3): 15–32. ———. 2006. “Colonialismo interno (una redefinición).” In La teoría marxista hoy, edited by Atilio Borón, Javier Amadero and Sabrina González. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. Gordon, Lewis. 2014. “Disciplinary Decadence and the Decolonization of Knowledge.” Africa Development 39 (1): 81–92. Gruzinski, Serge. 2002. The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization. Translated by Deke Dusinberre. London: Routledge. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe. (1615) 1987. Edited by John Murra, Rolena Adorno and Jorge L. Urioste. Madrid, Historia 16. Irigoyen García, Javier. 2008. “La arcadia Hispánica: los libros de pastores españoles y la exclusión de lo morisco.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Katzer Molina, Leticia. 2010.“El mestizaje como dispositivo biopolítico.” In Pueblos indígenas. Interculturalidad, colonialidad, política, compiled by Liliana Tamagno, 59–76. La Plata, AR: Biblos. Katzew, Ilona. 2004. Casta Painting. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Klor de Alva, Jorge. 1995. “The Postcolonization of the (Latin) American Experience: A Reconsideration of ‘Colonialism,’ ‘Postcolonialism’ and ‘Mestizaje’.” In After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, edited by Gyan Prakash, 241–275. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Konetzke, Richard, comp. and ed. 1953. Documentos para la historia de la formación social de Hispanoamérica, 1493 –1810, 4 vols. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. ———. 1962. “Legislación española y el mestizaje en América.” In El mestizaje en la historia de Ibero América. In Actas del Coloquio organizado por el Instituto de Estudios Iberoamericanos de Estocolmo, Suecia, el 19 de agosto de 1960, edited by Magnus Mörner, 50–64. Mexico City: Editorial Cvltvra. Kubler, George. 1952. The indian caste of Peru, 1795 –1940. A population study based upon tax records and census reports. Washington: Government Printing Office. Kuznesof, Elizabeth Anne. 1995. “Ethnic and Gender Influences on ‘Spanish’ Creole Society in Colonial Spanish America.” Colonial Latin American Review 4 (1): 153–176. Lambert, Gregg. 2016. “What is a Dispositif?” Lecture for Society for the Study of Biopolitical Futures, UNSW, Sydney. In Religious Theory. E-Supplement to the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. Part 1: http://jcrt.org/religioustheory/2016/07/11/what-is-a-dispositif-part-1/; Part 2: http://jcrt.org/religioustheory/2016/07/18/what-is-a-dispositif-part-2/

82

Mestizaje as a dispositif for a paradigm shift in colonial studies Lander, Edgardo. 2000. “Ciencias sociales: saberes coloniales y eurocéntricos.” In La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. Perspectivas latinoamericanas, edited by Edgardo Lander, 4–23. Caracas: CLACSO. Lepe-Carrión, Patricio. 2017. El contrato colonial de Chile. Quito: Abya Yala. Lijterman, Eliana. 2017.“Problems of Boundary. Reflections upon the Connections between the Discursive and Extradiscursive Orders within French Discourse Analysis.” Bakhtiniana: Revista de Estudos do Discurso 12 (2): 57–78. http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2176-45732017000200057& lng=en&nrm=iso Maldonado Torres, Nelson. 2008. “La descolonización y el giro descolonial.” Tabula Rasa 9: 61–72. Martínez, María Elena. 2008. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 2016. “‘Sexo y el archivo colonial’: el caso de ‘Mariano’ Aguilera.” In (In)disciplinar la investigación. Archivo, trabajo de campo y escritura, coordinated by Frida Gorbach and Mario Rufer, 227–250. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno. Martínez-San Miguel,Yolanda. 1999. Saberes americanos: subalternidad y epistemología en los escritos de Sor Juana. Pittsburgh: Nuevo Siglo Mazzotti, José Antonio. 1996. Coros mestizos del Inca Garcilaso. Resonancias andinas. Lima: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Meléndez, Mariselle. 2009.“The Cultural Production of Space in Colonial Latin America. From Visualizing Difference to the Circulation of Knowldge.” In The Spatial Turn. Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Barney Warf and Santa Arias, 173–191. London: Routledge. Melo Ruiz, Héctor Alfonso. 2013. “Alboroto y motín de la plebe racializada de don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora.” Vanderbilt e-Journal of Luso-Hispanic Studies 9: 128–137. Mignolo,Walter D. 2000. Local Histories/Global Designs. Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Moraña, Mabel, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos Jáuregui, eds. 2008. “Colonialism and Its Replicants.” In Coloniality at Large. Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, 1–20. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mörner, Magnus. 1961. “Presentación del tema.” El mestizaje en la historia de Ibero-America. Mexico City: Instituto Panamericano de Geografía e Historia. ———. 1962. El mestizaje en la historia de Ibero-América. Mexico: Editorial Cvltvra. ———. 1967. Race Mixture in the history of Latin America. Boston: Little Brown. Nemser, Daniel. 2017. Infrastructures of Race. Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. Houston: University of Texas Press. Olaechea Labayen, Juan B. 1992. El mestizaje como gesta. Madrid: MAPFRE. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 1994. Racial Formation in the United States. From the 1960s to the 1990s. London: Routledge. Portilla, Miguel León. 1959. Visión de los vencidos. Relaciones indígenas de la conquista. México, D.F.: Ediciones de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes:Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Quijano, Aníbal. 2008. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification.” In Coloniality at Large. Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate, edited by Mabel Moraña, Enrique Dussel, and Carlos Jáuregui, 181–224. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Quintero, Pablo. 2012.“Colonialismo interno.” In Diccionario del pensamiento alternativo II. Directed by Hugo Biagini and Arturo Roig. http://www.cecies.org/articulo.asp?id=451. Quispe-Agnoli, Rocío. 2017. “Mestizos (in)deseables en el Perú colonial temprano.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 43 (86): 127–150. Rappaport, Joanne. 2014. The Disappearing Mestizo. Configuring Difference in the Colonial New Kingdom of Granada. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 2010. Violencias (re)encubiertas en Bolivia. La Paz: Piedra Rota. Rosenblat, Ángel. 1954. El mestizaje y las castas coloniales. Buenos Aires: Nova. Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos. (1692) 1984. Seis obras, edited by William G. Bryant, 95–144. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho. Silverblatt, Irene. 1987. Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Perú. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Solórzano y Pereira, Juan. 1648. Politica indiana: sacada en lengua castellana de los dos tomos del Derecho i gouierno municipal de las Indias Occidentales que ... escribio en la Latina ... Don Iuan de Solorzano Pereira. Madrid. http://fondosdigitales.us.es Sommer, Doris. 1991. Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America. Berkeley: University of California Press.

83

Laura Catelli Stavenhagen, Rodolfo. 1963. “Clases, colonialismo y aculturación. Ensayo sobre un sistema de relaciones interétnicas en Mesoamérica.” América Latina, Revista del Centro Latinoamericano de Investigaciones en Ciencias Sociales 6 (4): 89–103. Stolcke,Verena. (1974) 1992. Racismo y sexualidad en la Cuba colonial. Madrid: Alianza, 1992. Stoler, Ann Laura. 1995. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2002. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press. Tapia, Luis. 2014. Dialéctica del colonialismo interno. La Paz: Autodeterminación. Torres Guillén, Jaime. 2014. “El carácter analítico y político del concepto de colonialismo interno de Pablo González Casanova.” Desacatos 45: 85–98. Twinam, Ann. 2015. Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Vainfas, Ronaldo. 1989. Trópico dos pecados. Rio de Janeiro: Campus. ———. 1995. A heresia dos índios: Catolicismo e rebeldia no Brasil colonial. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Vasconcelos, José. (1925) 1948. La raza cósmica: misión de la raza iberoamericana. Buenos Aires: Espasa Calpe. Veracini, Lorenzo. 2011. “Introducing Settler Colonial Studies.” Settler Colonial Studies 1: 1–12. Verdesio, Gustavo. 2001. “Todo lo que es sólido se disuelve en la academia: sobre los estudios coloniales, la teoría poscolonial, los estudios subalternos y la cultura material,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 35: 633–658. Wachtel, Nathan. 1971. La vision des vaincus. Les Indiens du Pérou devant la Conquête espagnole (1530 –1570). Paris: Gallimard. Young, Robert J.C. 1995. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge. Zamora, Margarita. 1987. “Filología Humanista e Historia Indígena en los Comentarios Reales.” Revista Iberoamericana 53 (140): 547–558. ———. 1988. Language, Authority, and Indigenous History in the Comentarios reales de los Incas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zermeño-Padilla, Guillermo. 2008. “Del mestizo al mestizaje. Arqueología de un concepto.” Memoria Social 12 (24): 79–95.

84

4 RACE, ETHNICITY AND NATIONHOOD IN THE FORMATION OF CRIOLLISMO IN SPANISH AMERICA José Antonio Mazzotti

This chapter will define some of the most important concepts in the process of identity formation among the criollo groups in colonial Spanish America, and particularly in Peru, in order to understand their peculiarity. The criollos were the descendants of Spanish settlers, born in the New World, allegedly from both a Spanish father and a Spanish mother. Over time, however, the criollos would descend from criollo ancestors and become one of the most important social groups in the conglomerate of races and ethnicities within Spain’s New World possessions. By historicizing the concepts of race, ethnicity and nationhood, this chapter demonstrates how identity formation in this peripheral, early modern context was closely linked to the perception of one’s individual lineage and blood. At the same time, being criollo was not solely a function of race; the creole identity in the Spanish-American context also assumed a series of cultural values, both European and American in origin, that would eventually become embodied in the modern forms of internal colonialism within the Spanish-American republics. Therefore, I will also address the concept of colonialism and nationhood in the construction of a modern criollo definition.

Defining the Criollo Most historians agree that the Spanish term criollo has its origin in the Portuguese “crioulo” (from “criar,” to raise), used to refer to Black slaves born out of Africa, i.e. in the Iberian Peninsula.The Portuguese term may date from the fifteenth century, and it initially had a classificatory purpose. In time, however, “crioulo” slaves were regarded as more savvy, skilled in local customs and fluent in Portuguese, as opposed to their parents, who came directly from Africa. After 1492 and the Spanish occupation of the Americas, the term criollo was used to name the offspring of Spaniards born in the New World. It obviously had a derogatory meaning because it still referred to part of the Black population. However, it became normalized and—at least in the Spanish-speaking areas of what is now Latin America—was gradually used to refer exclusively to the descendants of the Spaniards. Today, the word is mostly used with this meaning in Spanish America. One of the first times the word appears in writing is in the 1560s (Martínez-San

85

José Antonio Mazzotti

Miguel 2009, 404; see also Lavallé 1993, 15–25). The name became a denomination that criollos would assume with pride a few decades later. However, some derivations of the word in English (creole) or French (créole) preserved their original meaning, which included the presence of an African component. In Spanish America some criollos were direct descendants of the conquistadors and formed part of a social elite. Nonetheless, they felt dispossessed of the properties and benefits of their parents and ancestors due to what they perceived to be the greed of the Spanish Crown. In fact, with the New Laws of 1542, the Crown severely limited the economic power of the conquistadors. This important event is tied to how criollos reacted by advocating for their rights of inheritance and by creating a discourse of self-acclamation as a distinguished part of the Spanish identity. After a few generations, however, this discourse presented traces of local patriotism and collective identity that criollos themselves would define as a “nation” (in the archaic and preEnlightened sense of the word).They did not seek independence from Spain, just more political and economic privileges and a recognition of the services rendered by their ancestors the conquistadors. This was the case at least in Mexico City and Lima, capitals of the viceroyalties of Mexico in Peru.

The problem of the “nation”1 Because of the risks involved in positing the existence of a type of national identity prior to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century era of political independence, it is important to delineate the relationship between criollos and ethnic nationhood. An appreciation for the term “nation” in its arcane sense allows access to the peculiarities of this social formation. As I have previously noted in an article entitled “Nacionalismo criollo y poesía: el caso de Andrés Bello:” Beginning with the first creolist writings of the late-sixteenth century, there is evidence of a collective identity that fluctuates between dynastic fidelity to the Crown and an incomparable pride of belonging to the New World by birth and upbringing. This is the oft-cited “love of homeland” that, in an urban and micro-regional sense, can be discerned in such canonized texts as Pedro de Oña’s Arauco domado, Pedro de Peralta’s Lima fundada and the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios reales (recognizing, of course, that the latter presents a mestizophile proposal). Such writings, moreover, while mirroring the exaltations peninsular authors made to their own homelands, have a certain excessiveness that in many ways anticipates the emergence of the Baroque in the Spanish peninsula itself, as evidenced in the case of Bernardo de Balbuena’s Grandeza mexicana. There are also texts that recreate versions of the homeland exaltation using a highly exorbitant tone, as in the poems Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Copacabana (1641) by Fernando de Valverde and Fundación y grandezas de Lima (1687) by Rodrigo de Valdés. Finally, and beginning in the seventeenth century, [these writings] construct the argumentative armor of American splendor by underscoring the spiritual and intellectual nature of the creoles.The innate qualities of those who, by the next century, would begin to call themselves “American Spaniards” were recognized in these texts by symbols both pagan (the muses, the god Apollo) and Christian (sanctity, especially in the case of the Peruvian Viceroyalty) in order to bolster the idea that the best elements of European culture (the classics and Christianity) had acquired superior form and unprecedented development in the lands to the west of the Atlantic, mirroring the trajectory of the sun. (2010, 158–59, all translations unless otherwise indicated are my own) 86

Race, ethnicity and nationhood in the formation of criollismo in Spanish America

Thus, the analysis of this social formation suggests the importance of recognizing three premises: 1) the need to conceptually limit the notion of “creole nation” to its own historical coordinates, not confusing it with the subsequent nineteenth-century republican project of nationhood or relying upon a simple formula of complete equation with Spanish peninsular subjectivities and discursive practices; 2) the need to examine the ethnic dimensions of this elite creole nation in light of possible continuities with a discursive production that envisioned a communitarian ideal, but one based on the practices of “internal colonialism” (in the modern sense); and 3) the need to re-examine the reaches of postcolonial and decolonial theories in relation to the Latin American field, attending to the contributions of said theories to the interdisciplinary study of the literatures produced during, and based upon, different colonial experiences. The first two of these premises lead to a new understanding of Spanish-American historical development based on its being a region originally composed of multiple nations within most of its modern political “nation-state” entities. This new perspective suggests that SpanishAmerican post-independence nationalist discourses, homogenizing in their insistence on equal citizenship, were always more projective of desire than synchronic reality. To further bolster this interpretation of the region’s development, one need only look ahead to the latter half of the eighteenth century, a period that well illustrates the arguments that I make in regard to the first half of the same century and before. I will concentrate on the case of Peru in order to be more specific.

The case of Lima Before glimpsing that second half of the eighteenth century, it is important to remember that pre-Hispanic Lima was far from an uninhabited space. When the explorers Francisco Pizarro sent from Jauja first arrived in the valley of Rímac on January 6, 1535, they found an extensive network of temples, buildings, and sown fields, even if not exactly in the form of a city. The evidence of this network still exists in the 366 archeological sites in and around Lima that today are in urgent need of restoration (see Fernández Calvo 2013). According to Javier Protzel, the valleys of Chillón, Rímac, and Lurín together housed an indigenous population of some 150,000 souls in 1535 (26). Although Mario Cárdenas Ayaipoma posits a smaller number (some calculations suggest a population of only 30,000 tributary indigenes), he nonetheless admits that the population may have been much larger (2014, 30). In any case, the area was relatively populated, due at least in part to the presence of the Temple of Pachacamac, a centuries-old pilgrimage site in the valley of Lurín, some twenty-six kilometers south of the center of present-day Lima.This area, in addition to its sacred character, was therefore also the site of numerous migratory crossroads. Furthermore, the fertility of its valleys made this entire area an arable zone. In the decades after the arrival of the Europeans, the indigenous population fell precipitously. By 1571, between 64% and 97% of the tributary indigenous population had already disappeared (Cárdenas Ayaipoma 2014, 38). In a clear example of the Spanish practice of reducción, conquering officials eventually relocated the remaining native peoples to a neighboring area that became known as El Cercado (“The Enclosure”). Other indigenous inhabitants were grouped into settlements such as Magdalena and Surco and were rendered indios de servicio for the Spanish families of Lima.2 Guaman Poma, writing his Primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno in the early seventeenth century, could hardly be indifferent to the plight of Lima’s indigenous population. He expressed dismay upon seeing so many Indians dressing as Spaniards, cutting their hair, and carrying weapons. He called this reality “a world upside down,” one in which the indigenous people had lost their traditional values and became transformed into hybrid, unrecognizable beings. He took 87

José Antonio Mazzotti

particular notice of the “Indian whores, shouldering little mestizos and mulattos,” who offered themselves to the Spaniards and Blacks, thus engendering a racial mixture that he felt was destroying the foundations of indigenous society. And for this problem, he concluded, “there is no remedy” (Ayala 1980, vol. II, 47). Paul J. Charney’s analysis of this same historical conjuncture (2001, 8–11) underscores the high level of assimilation that Lima’s indigenous population was experiencing, an assimilation that, while engendering a culture of mixtures and contrasts, was nonetheless deeply driven by the aspiration to Spanish forms and manners.3 In material terms, criollos of the seventeenth century began to exercise greater control over Peru’s extensive commercial networks—the most active and lucrative in all of the Americas at the time. In particular, the merchants of Lima enjoyed tremendous commercial autonomy visà-vis the Spanish Crown, largely because of their ability to control local financial operations through the Tribunal del Consulado. By the 1600s, this regulating mercantile body was mainly composed of wealthy creoles and their financial allies, including most importantly the owners of the seven banks in existence in seventeenth-century Lima. Within this locally based system, the Catholic church and the various creole-dominated religious orders also played important roles as bankers and creditors. As a result, the Consulado was able to regularly offer large amounts of money to the Crown in exchange for the privilege of administrating viceregal commercial operations. According to Margarita Suárez, “a monetary loan was all that was needed for the king to allow his laws to be ignored” (2001, 397). Despite the Spanish Crown’s obvious and desperate need for spices and precious metals to meet its many imperial obligations, it seemed incapable of creating or sustaining any effective economic administration. In this context, New World chroniclers and poets repeatedly drew attention to the wealth and luxury of Lima and to its many ornate churches. Lohmann Villena (1985) explained the source of this wealth in his scholarly introduction to the Noticia general del Perú, a seventeenth-century text written by the viceregal Treasurer Francisco López de Caravantes. According to Lohmann Villena, the accelerated extraction of silver from Potosí after 1570 began to greatly enrich the city of Lima, creating a vigorous commercial economy and a steady flow of precious metals.4 Luis Miguel Glave (1998) also pointed to the abundant wealth within the seventeenth-century City of Kings (i.e., Lima), and argued that the distributive patterns of this wealth began to restructure relationships between the city’s various social sectors.5 Although creole merchants were the principal driving force behind the emergence of a wealthy creole elite in seventeenth-century Lima, for young creole men without access to commercial capital or lucrative posts within the viceregal bureaucracy, the priesthood became the preferred career choice. Not surprisingly, then, an intellectual elite also emerged among Peru’s creoles within various religious orders. Within these prestigious ranks, creole writers began to elaborate an ethnocentric discourse about the inexhaustible richness (both material and spiritual) of South America, which at that point in history was mostly the Peruvian viceroyalty. My argument is that creole textual production in the seventeenth century played an important role in the formation of an early type of ethnic creole nationhood in Lima, as creole intellectuals in this South American capital city strategically carved out their own identity space.6 While forever insisting upon their loyalty to the Spanish Crown and its dominion in the New World, they nonetheless proclaimed the superiority both of their native Peru and of their particular ancestors (i.e., the original conquerors). This argument about the emergence of a creole “ethnic nation” during the seventeenth century must, of course, be understood within the parameters of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century terminology (see Pagden 91) and not in relation to modern understandings. During the seventeenth century, the word “nation” still referred to a human group whose common ancestry, language, religion, territorial origins, and, most

88

Race, ethnicity and nationhood in the formation of criollismo in Spanish America

importantly, cultural ties defined them as having been born (literally, natio) of a central matrix. The term “nation” was generally used to refer to those human groups within a larger kingdom who had their own distinct characteristics. Examples of recognized “nations” within the Peruvian viceroyalty included the idea of an “Indian nation” (with its many “peoples,” including the Cañaris, Huancas, Collas, etc.), an “African nation” (with its Lucumí, Angolese, Carabalíes, etc.), and the “Spanish nation” (with its Castilians, Andalusians, Catalans, etc.). Creoles in the New World who wished to differentiate themselves from the peninsular-born members of the “Spanish nation” began to emphasize their particular origins by using the term “creole nation.” By the second half of the seventeenth century, this term had become commonplace and expressed a clear sense of an early form of nationhood. Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, the Mexican savant, used the term in his Theatro de virtudes políticas (1680, f. 17), as did Antonio de Montalvo in El sol del Nuevo Mundo (1683, f. 16r), and Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, the creole historian of Potosí, in his early eighteenth-century Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí (1965, Book 9, Ch. 18). Surely, then, what was meant by “nation” in the seventeenth century was a series of subjective commonalities within and among human groupings, and it was during the seventeenth century that the term “creole nation” began to circulate with great form and eloquence.7 Turning now to the eighteenth century, it is interesting to examine the observations made in the 1740s by two members of the La Condamine expedition on the calamitous state of Lima’s indigenous population.8 In their Relación histórica del viaje a la América Meridional (1748) Jorge Juan and Antonio Ulloa were particularly struck by the decadence of the city’s two remaining caciques: The great number of Indians that the Valley [of Lima] had, both before and at the time of the Conquest, has now shrunk to the small numbers living in these Communities [Surco, Los Chorillos, Miraflores, La Magdalena, Lurigancho, Late or Ate, Pachacama, Lurín and the two slums of El Callao]. And among these [Communities] there remain only two known Caciques, those of Miraflores and Surco, both so miserable and unfortunate that they have been reduced to making a living from teaching people in Lima how to play certain musical instruments. El quantio∫o nùmero de Indios, que tuvo aquel Valle [de Lima], antes, y con el tiempo de la Conqui∫ta, e∫tà ya reducido al abreviado de e∫tos Pueblos [de Surco, Los Chorrillos, Miraflores, La Magdalena, Lurigancho, Late o Ate, Pachacama, Lurín y los dos arrabales de El Callao], y entre ellos no ∫e conocen aora mas que dos Caciques, que ∫on el de Miraflores y Surco, tan mí∫eros, y desdichados, que e∫tàn reducidos a vivir del exercicio de en∫eñar en Lima a tocar algunos in∫trumentos.] (vol. III, 55) While they noted the shrinking indigenous population and the numerical majority of Lima’s Black population, what most impressed Juan and Ulloa was the European character of the city, apparent in the development and splendor of its creole elite. According to Juan and Ulloa, this was an elite characterized by its economic power, its distinguished lineage, and the imperative of retaining its whiteness: The Families of white creoles are those who possess the wealth of Lands and Haciendas; and among these there are some that are very Distinguished, because their Ancestors came to these parts with honorable Positions. And bringing their Families with them,

89

José Antonio Mazzotti

they established themselves here and remained; and they have worked to maintain the prestige of their Ancestors by marrying either their equals from this Country or Europeans who arrive in the Armadas. But other [creole families] cannot avoid experiencing a decline from their original level of Distinction. Las Familias de Criollos blancos ∫on las que po∫∫een los bienes de Tierras, ò Haciendas; y entre e∫tas hay algunas de mucha Di∫tincion; porque ∫us A∫cendientes pa∫∫aron à aquellos parajes con Empleos honorificos, y llevando ∫us Familias, quedaron e∫tablecidos allì, y han procurado mantener∫e en el lu∫tre de ∫us Antepa∫∫ados ca∫ando, ò ya con ∫us iguales del Paìs, ò de los Europeos, que van en las Armadas; bien que en otras no dexa de experimentar∫e decadencia de su primera Di∫tincion. (vol. I, 40) Clearly the creole “splendor” that Juan and Ulloa observed was not constituted by economic class alone, but also by a form of ethnic aggrupation defined by racial and cultural characteristics. For this reason, the “splendor” of the creoles could also be claimed by an important group of poor whites who eventually came to constitute the “popular” base of the creole nation: There are also other Families of People who are white, though poor; and these either intermingle with the Castes or originate from [the Castes], and thus they contribute to the mixing of Bloods. However, when that [mixture] cannot be detected in their own color, their being white is enough to make them happy and lets them enjoy this privilege. Otras Familias hay tambièn de Gente blanca, aunque pobre, que ò e∫tàn enlazadas con las de Ca∫tas, ò tienen ∫u origen en ellas; y a∫si participan de mezcla en la Sangre; pero cuando no ∫e di∫tingue e∫ta por el color, les ba∫ta el ∫er blancos, para tener∫e por felices, y gozar de e∫ta preferencia. (vol. I, 41) Most interesting about this population of poorer creoles is not their racial “purity” per se, or lack thereof; rather, it is their desire to be recognized as racially “pure” and thereby distinguish themselves socially, despite any evidence of mixture with castes or other groups that could threaten their identity as creoles. This is precisely the phenomenon of the delimitation of creole collective identity through contrast with other groups (Blacks, Indians, mulattos, mestizos) with which the creoles interacted but did not share ancestry, values, or the recognition of common customs. Moreover, even in cases where a “mixing of blood” occurred, the appearance of whiteness was enough to merit creole status, or as Juan and Ulloa observed, “their being white is enough to make them happy.”9 As to Lima’s ethnic character, Juan and Ulloa observed that “the many Neighborhoods of Lima are made up of Whites or Spaniards, Blacks, the Castes of these, then the Indians, Mestizos and the rest of the species that come from the mixture of all three” (“el numero∫o Vezindario de Lima, ∫e compone de Blancos, ò E∫pañoles, Negros y Ca∫tas de e∫tos, Indios, Me∫tizos, y las demas especies, que provienen en la mezcla de todas tres,” (vol. III, 67)). Penning their observations in the 1740s, Juan and Ulloa claimed that “according to the most prudent calculation,” there were some sixteen to eighteen thousand white people in Lima (ibid.). Of these, one fourth to one third belonged to the local nobility: “many of whom are distinguished by the prestige of ancient or modern Titles from Castile, including 45 Counts and Marquises” (“mucha parte e∫tà

90

Race, ethnicity and nationhood in the formation of criollismo in Spanish America

elevada con la dignidad de Tìtulos de Ca∫tilla antiguos, ò modernos; entre los cuales se cuentan entre Condes y Marque∫es 45,” (vol. III, 68)).There were also numerous “Knights of the Military and Religious Orders … and 24 Inherited Estates, without Title, the greater part of which are of ancient origin” (“Cavalleros Cruzados en las Religiones Militares [...y] 24 Mayorazgos, ∫in Titulo, y la mayor parte de ellos tienen fundaciones antiguas,” (ibid.)). In other words, the number of persons of noble rank in Lima at the middle of the eighteenth century would have amounted to some four to six thousand. Taking the average number of five thousand noble “whites” (the majority of whom were creoles), and adding these to the numbers of non-noble “whites” (which, according to Juan and Ulloa’s calculations, would have been about twelve thousand, some of whom had presumably “mixed” with the Castes), one ends up with a critical mass of some seventeen thousand inhabitants who identified as creoles, undoubtedly clinging to their distinguished origins, and continued to celebrate the proud traditions of the city of Lima.10 In their comments on the wealth and ostentation of Lima’s elite families, Juan and Ulloa added: Because they all maintain themselves in great decency, their opulence is most apparent: for just as they have a large number of slaves and Domestic servants on hand, so too for their external appearance and convenience, they make use of the most elegant and comfortable coaches as well as Carriages that do not need to be as expensive. Mantienen∫e todas con gran decencia, y con e∫ta brilla la opulencia: pues a∫si como tiene para ∫u ∫ervicio crecido numero de Dome∫ticos libres, y e∫clavos; para el exterior aparato, y comodidad u∫an de coches los de mayor di∫tincion, ò conveniencias, y de Cale∫as los que no tienen preci∫ion de hacer tanto co∫to. (ibid.) The use of so many coaches and carriages in the city (no fewer than seven thousand, according to Juan and Ulloa) was not only an exercise in ostentation; it also provided a way to avoid the abundance of mule dung that accumulated in Lima’s streets as a result of the city’s vigorous commerce. Over time this dung would turn into a foul-smelling dust “so annoying it becomes intolerable to walk through because it interferes with breathing” (“tan fa∫tidio∫o, que es intolerable para andar ∫obre èl, como mole∫to a la re∫piracion,” (vol. III, 69)). Not unexpectedly, Juan and Ulloa also engaged in the common practice of praising the intelligence of the creoles: “creoles begin to demonstrate their knowledge of Science shortly after studying it.This is more the result of the nobility of their Intellect than of their practices or arts” (“[los Criollos] empiezan a luzir la Ciencia adquirida à poco de e∫tudiarla. Efecto unicamente de la nobleza de ∫us Entendimientos mas que de ∫u cultivo, ò arte,” (vol. III, 56)). They then concluded that Lima “has the advantage over all other cities in the culture of the Mind” (“∫e aventaja à las demàs [ciudades] en la cultura de los Entendimientos,” (vol. III, 57)). At the same time, Juan and Ulloa were also struck by the creoles’ adulatory tendencies and their identification with European symbols, especially when it came to the pompous receptions staged in Lima for newly arriving Spanish viceroys, receptions that city officials continued to organize in the eighteenth century even after the Crown had prohibited such displays. These receptions generally included a Te Deum high mass, the filing of city officials before the viceroy (the traditional kissing of the hand), and a reception “with magnificent refreshments throughout the palace halls in which all the Nobility partook” (“con un magnífico refre∫co, que tambièn es general à toda la Nobleza, que se halla en los salones,” (vol. III, 62)).

91

José Antonio Mazzotti

Nonetheless, there were fissures within the city’s governing elite, and these would become fully evident in the wake of the earthquake of October 28, 1746, with its devastating effects on Lima and the port of El Callao. As Walker (2008) and Pérez-Mallaína (2001) made clear, it was then that Lima’s honorable creoles rose in resistance to Viceroy José Antonio Manso de Velasco, the Count of Superunda, whose plans for reconstruction threatened the structures of urban hierarchy that had been carefully erected in the city over a period of more than two hundred years. The figure in charge of these reconstruction plans was Louis Godin, a French architect who, along with Juan and Ulloa, had arrived in Lima with the La Condamine expedition. Although Godin and his viceroy patron “did not pretend to banish social distinctions or question the elite’s right to predominate,” they did seek, “in political terms, to reduce the clout of Lima’s upper echelon” (Walker 2008, 97). The long-term consequences of the 1746 earthquake certainly went beyond the rebuilding of the city; this was a turning point in the history of Lima, both in terms of urbs, or material design, and civitas, or social and political structure.11 Pedro Lozano, an eyewitness chronicler of the devastation and its aftermath, described the tremendous zeal with which the city’s creole nobility, inspired by “the love of Homeland” (1747, unnumbered folio), went about their efforts to reconstruct the city and provide its population with food and supplies. In spite of this active leadership and the predominance of creoles on the Royal High Court in Lima (see Lohmann Villena, 1974), the exigencies of the distant Crown continued to limit the administrative autonomy of the city and frustrate the creoles’ increased aspirations to the powers of governance. The unfortunate circumstances of the earthquake only fueled such aspirations; faced with the costs of rebuilding the city, the Royal Court allowed many more creoles to become Crown officials, or corregidores, in the hopes that they would collect the revenues needed for reconstruction. This allowance for creoles was made in the months following the earthquake, but little by little the Viceroy was able to regain control of the revenues from the corregimientos, diverting the funds from reconstruction efforts and sending them instead to help cover the Crown’s financial obligations in Europe (Pérez-Mallaína 2001, 119–124). In fact, the viceroy Count of Superunda was “one of the most efficient of viceroys when it came time to send silver to the metropolis.” (Pérez-Mallaína 2001, 122) The actions of the Crown and the viceroy, their apparent indifference to the plight of the city, and their sluggish response to its urgent needs constituted a fundamental point of rupture with the city’s creole elite, exacerbating the resentment of many who felt unrepresented by a faraway and inefficient administration. “It seems clear that the Crown’s social consciousness reflected the typical notion of State existing at that time” (Pérez-Mallaína 2001, 124); in other words, the viceregal administration of Peru did not represent the best interests of the local population (in this case, the interests of the creoles), and the events surrounding the earthquake of 1746 made this disjuncture once again very evident. In the ensuing decades, the aggressive interjection of Crown policy through the implementation of the so-called Bourbon Reforms (see Kinsbruner 1994, 3–24; Burckholder 2013, 110– 128) only strengthened and consolidated the feelings of differentiation that creole bards and chroniclers had been expressing since the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, the creoles’ fear of a Cuzco-centered movement for hegemony led by indigenous and mestizo elements ended up being stronger than their feelings of alienation from the Spanish Crown.This was manifest in the creole reaction to the Great Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II, begun on November 4, 1780. Although there were some creoles among the rebel ranks, the vast majority of the creole population, particularly in Lima, remained faithful to the Crown, condemning the audacity of the selfproclaimed Inca descendants.

92

Race, ethnicity and nationhood in the formation of criollismo in Spanish America

Independence and the prevalence of criollo identity An exhaustive account of the many instances of the ambiguous stance of Lima’s creole elite both before and after independence is obviously beyond the purview of these pages. It is enough to mention that the “Society of Friends of the Country,” publishers of the Mercurio Peruano from 1791–1795, actually began by calling themselves the “Society of Friends of Lima” (so proclaimed in the first pages of their publication). Once independence was proclaimed, on July 28, 1821, the “national” symbols created by the new republican government were likewise Limacentric, as in the case of the crest on the first national flag designed by General José de San Martín (Figure 4.1.). In this flag, the coat of arms represents a sun rising from behind the mountains, which makes little sense from the perspective of the eastern slopes of the Andes or from the Amazon. Similarly, Peru’s national anthem contains a stanza that is markedly Lima-centric: “May the peaks of the Andes hold high / the bi-colored flag or banner / that proclaims for all time / the strength that freedom forever has given us. / Let us live peacefully under its shade / and since the sun is born from those peaks / let us renew the great pledge / that we make to the God of Jacob” (emphasis added). The poetic image of the sun rising from the peaks is obviously not evoking a perspective from the eastern Andes or the Amazon. In both these examples, a homogenizing view of the “patria” prevails, extending a Lima-centric vision that purports to assimilate an unrepresented or underrepresented multiplicity of ethnic, social, and racial formations within the new, “national” state. In this sense, the “God of Jacob” continues to be the god of the conquerors.12

Figure 4.1  F  irst flag of Peru, designed by General José de San Martín. Note how the coat of arms reflects a coastal, creole perspective of the country. Source: Museo Naval del Callao, Marina de Guerra del Perú. Photo: J. A. Mazzotti. Page 3, Calendar section.

93

José Antonio Mazzotti

Although there was some popular participation in the struggle for independence (see Morán and Aguirre 2013), the creole leadership of the new nation-state managed to maintain its traditional colonial practices over the course of the first decades of republican rule. In fact, in some ways, those practices became further entrenched; Simón Bolívar’s 1825 abolition of the indigenous cacicazgos and the law establishing Castilian as the only official language of Peru are two examples of measures that fulfilled Bourbon aspirations from the eighteenth century (Rowe 1954, 52–53). Indeed, the linguistic conquest and colonization of Peru was consolidated only during the Republic, even as most of the population continued to speak Quechua, Aymara, or one of the nearly one hundred other surviving indigenous languages. (Today that number has been reduced to about fifty, many of which are rapidly vanishing to the rhythms of globalization.) Although the mid-nineteenth century witnessed some movement toward a more inclusive liberalism, specifically with the abolition of slavery and indigenous tribute, the ethnic and classbased exclusivity that defined the new republic’s creole leadership was able to retain a system of power based upon ownership of the land and the marginalization of peasants and workers descended from the same ethnic groups exploited during the colony. This exclusivity remained largely in place until it was challenged in 1969 by the Agrarian Reform instituted by General Juan Velasco Alvarado during his leftist and nationalist government. In this sense, Peru’s republican history supports Margarita Serje’s argument that the Latin American nation-states should not be understood as failures (2005); instead, they have been highly effective vehicles for neutralizing any and all agents who would threaten the prevailing neo-colonial model. With the sudden introduction into Peru of the neoliberal economic model (massive privatization, weakening of the national states, reduction in workers’ rights, lifting of tariffs on foreign imports and the subsequent collapse of national industries, etc.), powerful sectors of the creole population have been recycled and reinvigorated. This model entered Peru during the so-called “Second Phase” of the military government led by General Francisco Morales Bermúdez from 1975 to 1980 and brought to fruition during the civil dictatorship of the engineer Alberto Fujimori in the 1990s. The creole population, following the selective reanimation produced by the advent of neoliberalism, has admitted a greater degree of mestizo presence, but has continued to champion a Lima-centric national spirit and the privileges of the traditionally dominant groups. Part of this domination is based on blatant racism not necessarily in the form of open discourses, but in the form of social practices. However, it is important to remember that modern racism is a relatively recent phenomenon. The discriminatory categories that were applied before the Enlightenment were mainly due to a religious conception of identity, based on the concepts of “blood” and “nation” (the latter—I insist—in its archaic and ethnic sense). In their modern meaning, categories such as “race” prevailed especially in the eighteenth century, when human classification schemes were consolidated by strictly biological and physiognomic features, with the consequent reaffirmation of indigenous and Afro-descendant groups at the base of the social pyramid.13 Indeed, as Margarita Zamora (2010) has clarified, the concept of “race” did not strictly apply to the physical features of an individual during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The word existed, of course, but it referred to a spiritual defectivity, referring above all to Jews and Muslims in the Spain of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.14 To speak of “race” for the indigenous population of the pre-enlightened centuries is thus anachronistic. However, modern racism substituted other forms of discrimination as time passed. Today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the racism that exists in Peru and the concomitant failure to extend respect, opportunities, and rights to indigenous communities and

94

Race, ethnicity and nationhood in the formation of criollismo in Spanish America

to a broad range of impoverished mestizos and Afro-Peruvians recall the oppressive practices inherited from the colonial era. Lima-centrism is alive and well in Peru, even though Lima is no longer the Spanish city it originally claimed to be. Even in the case of so-called decolonial initiatives, whereby epistemological elements of indigenous origin become part of political movements of resistance against the ravages of neoliberalism, the creole republic still prefers that its gnoseological and axiological foundations be of European design. So claims someone quite familiar with ideas of resource redistribution and the strategies of knowledge basic to the sustainable development of Peru: Creole culture, which is hegemonic in Peru, operates upon two underlying premises that position Eurocentrism as the critical factor par excellence in the tree of questions involved in the production and administration of knowledge. First of all, there is the notion that Western rationality can only be produced outside of Peru. This [premise] leads the elite creoles to live a paradox: they define themselves as modern, yet they do not participate in the production of global modernity; they are mere consumers of the products of modernity. Secondly, there is the premise that millions of Andean, Amazonian and mestizo men and women must necessarily, albeit parasitically, adopt the systems of modern knowledge; and yet, paradoxically, the promoters of this modernity—the creoles—have no idea how to produce or administer it. (Víctor Carranza, ex-President of Concytec, Peru’s National Council of State on Science and Technology, 2015) It seems that today, more than ever, criollo identities and their Europeanized aspirations are alive and kicking in the political and social spectrum of Spanish America. Although I have mainly referred to the case of Peru and Lima, similar arguments can be made about other countries in the region. Race, ethnicity and nation are categories that need to be studied together in order to grasp the complexity of the criollo phenomenon in today’s Spanish America.

Notes 1 The following paragraphs summarize and paraphrase the Epilogue of my book Lima fundida: épica y nación criolla en el Perú (2016), translated into English by Barbara Corbett as The Creole Invention of Peru: Ethnic Nation and Epic Poetry in Colonial Lima (2019). 2 See also the tables presented by Cárdenas Ayaipoma (2014, 93–100), comparing the figures proposed by David Noble Cook (1998), and John Rowe (1976). 3 Most insightful in this regard is Karen Graubart’s description of the “creole Indians” of Trujillo and Lima who proudly assumed the adjective “creole” in an attempt to differentiate themselves in dress, manner, and even dwelling choice from the common Indians who lived outside of the city and retained many pre-Hispanic customs (2009). 4 Although Spaniards discovered the Potosí silver mines in 1545, it was not until the administration of Viceroy Toledo (1569–1581) that a massive labor force was mobilized to work these mines through the manipulation of the ancient Inca system of the mit'a. See also Lohmann Villena’s “Estudio preliminar” in León Pinelo (1953, vii–clxxxvi). 5 By the early seventeenth century, Lima had a population of approximately 25,000; of these, 10,000 or so were of European descent, 10,000 of African descent, and 5,000 or so were Indian. See Glave (1998, 163). 6 A similar case can be made for viceregal Mexico. See Mazzotti (2000) and Pedro Cebollero (2009). 7 For a detailed discussion of the term’s ambiguity, multiple meanings, and different uses during the colonial period, see Luis Monguió (1978). The concept of a “form of nationhood” is drawn from Richard Helgerson’s illuminating study Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (1992). See also Anthony Pagden (1987) for a discussion of the term “creole nation.”

95

José Antonio Mazzotti 8 Charles Marie de La Condamine’s scientific expedition to Ecuador and Peru lasted from 1735 to 1745. He and the scientists from the expedition (Louis Godin, Joseph de Jussieu, Pierre Bouguer) were able to take exact measurements of the earth and make different geographical calculations from the equatorial line. Among his staff were two Spanish officers, Jorge Juan and Antonio Ulloa, who spent several months in Lima. La Condamine is also credited with the European discovery of rubber and quinine trees. 9 The insistence on whiteness and whitening has long been documented. Lohmann Villena (2003) demonstrated that many creoles, in an effort to obtain titles of nobility, composed genealogies tracing their lineages back to the most prestigious families of “old Christians” in Spain.This obsession had to do with the Spaniards suspicions regarding the origins of creoles. As Stuart Schwartz (1995) and Elizabeth Kuznesof (1995) have shown, as many as 20%–40% of “creole” children born during the first generations after the conquest were actually mestizos but were considered “creoles” because of their Spanish fathers. 10 According to Protzel’s estimates, Lima’s total population was around 54,000 at the middle of the eighteenth century and remained relatively unchanged for a century thereafter. Only with the nineteenthcentury guano boom did Lima’s population grow substantially, reaching 100,000 by the census of 1876 (2009, 37). 11 For a detailed description of the destruction suffered by the city and its port, and of the efforts by public officials to control the ensuing chaos, see the interesting Carta o Diario, published in 1747 by the prominent creole José Eusebio Llano y Zapata. 12 It was no coincidence that President Alan García Pérez imposed this stanza for all official ceremonies beginning in 2009 during his second presidential administration (2006–2011). The imposition of the stanza displaced the more traditional stanza that had been sung for various generations and that had a more secular character (“The oppressed Peruvian had for a long time / been dragging his ominous chains…”). The stanza’s implicit omission of eastern Peru in its vision of the national whole makes perfect sense in light of García’s description of the indigenous peoples of eastern Peru as “perros del hortelano” [“farm dogs”] and “ciudadanos que no son de primera clase” [“not first-class citizens”] (see García Pérez 2015). 13 Glenn Loury defines race as “a cluster of inheritable bodily markings carried by a largely endogamous group of individuals, markings that can be observed by others with ease, that can be changed or misrepresented only with great difficulty, and that have come to be invested in a particular society at a given historical moment with social meaning.” (2002, 20–21). 14 Zamora points out that:“The early modern Spanish term raza was employed in a pejorative sense to refer to the cultural difference of Jews, Muslims and their descendants.The common expression ‘tener raza’ implied a moral defect (in the larger sense of the term predominant in early modern Spanish, from the Latin moralis, ‘custom, mores’) or fault deriving from a person’s descent from Jews, Muslims or conversos. Covarrubias’s Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, identified the origins of the term in the Tuscan word for thread, noting that in old Spanish raça referred to an uneven or defective thread that stands out from the rest in a piece of cloth. Applied to lineage, it became derogatory” (Zamora, 364; see Covarrubias ([1611] 1674, 155).

Works cited Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, Bartolomé. 1965. Historia de la Villa Imperial de Potosí, edited by Lewis Hanke and Gunnar Mendoza, 3 vols. Providence: Brown University Press. Cárdenas Ayaipoma, Mario. 2014. La población aborigen en Lima colonial. Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú Carranza,Víctor. 2015.“Somos el país latinoamericano.” https://ojoconelhorizonte.lamula.pe/2015/11/02/ hacia-el-conocimiento/taniatemoche/. Cebollero, Pedro. 2009. Discurso, retórica y agencia del criollo mexicano en “Nuevo Mundo y Conquista” de Francisco de Terrazas. Berlin:VDM Verlag. Charney, Paul J. 2001. Indian Society in the Valley of Lima, Peru, 1532 –1824. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Cook, Noble David. 1998. “Introducción.” In Relación de la vida y milagros de San Francisco Solano by Luis Gerónimo de Oré, ix–xxxix. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Covarrubias, Sebastián. (1611) 1674. Tesoro de la lengua castellana. Madrid: Por Luis Sánchez. Fernández Calvo, Lourdes. 2013. “El 60% de las huacas de Lima está en peligro de ser invadido.” Diario El Comercio, https://archivo.elcomercio.pe/sociedad/lima/60-huacas-lima-esta-riesgo-invadido_1-noticia1600637

96

Race, ethnicity and nationhood in the formation of criollismo in Spanish America García Pérez, Alan. 2015. “Alan García, Indígenas: ciudadanos de segunda clase.” https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=nQzFEJ14L7M Glave, Luis Miguel. 1998. De rosa y espinas. Economía, sociedad y mentalidades andinas, siglo XVII. Lima: IEP/ BCRP. Graubart, Karen. 2009. “The Creolization of the New World: Local Forms of Identification in Urban Colonial Peru, 1560–1640.” Hispanic American Historical Review 89 (3): 471–499. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe. 1980. Nueva corónica y bien gobierno [ca. 1615]. Mexico City: Siglo XXI editores, 3 vols Helgerson, Richard. 1992. Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Juan, Jorge and Antonio de Ulloa. 1748. Relación histórica del viaje a la América Meridional. Madrid: Antonio Marín. Kinsbruner, Jay. 1994. Independence in Spanish America. Civil Wars, Revolutions, and Underdevelopment. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Kuznesof, Elizabeth Anne. 1995. “Ethnic and Gender Influences on ‘Spanish’ Creole Society in Colonial Spanish America.” Colonial Latin American Review 4 (1): 153–176. Lavallé, Bernard. 1993. Las promesas ambiguas. Ensayos sobre el criollismo colonial en los Andes, Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. León Pinelo, Antonio de. 1953. El gran canciller de las Indias, edited and introduced by Guillerno Lohmann Villena. Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos. Llano y Zapata, José Eusebio de. 1747. CARTA, O DIARIO / QUE / E∫cribe D. Joseph Eu∫ebio de Llano, y Zapata / A / Su mas venerado Amigo, y Docto corre∫pondiente / EL DOCTOR / Don Ignacio Chirivoga, y Daza, Canonigo de la Sanc- / ta Igle∫ia de Quito, / EN QUE / CON LA MAYOR VERDAD,Y CRITICA MAS / ∫egura le dá cuenta de todo lo acaecido en e∫ta Capital del / Perù de∫de el Viernes 28 de Octubre de 1746, quando experimentò ∫u mayor ruyna con él grande Movimiento de / Tierra, que padeció à las diez, y media de la noche el mencionado dia, ha∫ta el 16 de Febrero de 1747 con una Ta- / bla en que ∫e dà el calculo exacto de todo él numero de / Temblores, que ∫e han ∫entido en el tragico / suce∫∫o, que es la∫timo∫o A∫∫umpto / de e∫te E∫crito [...]. // Con licencia del Real y Superior Govierno. Lima: Calle de la Barranca por Francisco Sobrino. LohmannVillena, Guillermo. 1974. Los ministros de la Audiencia de Lima en el reinado de los Borbones (1700 –1821). Sevilla: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos. ———. 1985. “Estudio preliminar.” In Noticia general del Perú, edited by Francisco López de Caravantes, vol. 1, 5–75. Madrid: Atlas. ———. 2003. Los americanos en las órdenes nobiliarias. 2 vols. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Loury, Glenn C. 2002. The Anatomy of Racial Inequality. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Lozano, Pedro [attributed to]. 1747. Individual y verdadera relacion de la extrema ruyna que padeció la Ciudad de los Reyes Lima, capitàl del reyno del Perù, con el horrible temblòr de tierra acaecido en ella la noche del dia 28 de octubre de 1746. Lima: no publisher consigned. Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda. 2009. “Poéticas caribeñas de lo criollo: creole/criollo/creolité.” In Poéticas de lo criollo. La transformación del concepto criollo en las letras hispanoamericanas (siglo XVI al XIX), edited by Juan M.Vitulli and David Solodkow, 403–441. Buenos Aires: Corregidor. Mazotti, José Antonio. 2000. “Resentimiento criollo y nación étnica: el papel de la épica novohispana.” In Agencias criollas: La ambigüedad “colonial” en las letras hispanoamericanas, edited by José Antonio Mazzotti, 143–160. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana. ———. 2010. “Nacionalismo criollo y poesía: el caso de Andrés Bello,” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 70: 257–270. ———. 2016. Lima fundida: épica y nación criolla en el Perú. Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert ———. 2019. The Creole Invention of Peru: Ethnic Nation and Epic Poetry in Colonial Lima. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press. Monguió, Luis. 1978. “Palabras e ideas: ‘Patria’ y ‘Nación’ en el Virreinato del Perú.” Revista Iberoamericana 44 (174–175): 451–470. Montalvo, Francisco Antonio de. 1683. El sol del Nuevo Mundo ideado y compuesto en las esclarecidas operaciones del bienaventurado Toribio Arçobispo de Lima. Roma: Imprenta de Ángel de Bernavò. Morán, Daniel and María Aguirre. 2013. La plebe en armas. La participación popular en las guerras de Independencia. Lima: Universidad Peruana Simón Bolívar-Fondo Editorial. Pagden, Anthony. 1987. “Identity formation in Spanish America.” In Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500 –1800, edited by Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, 51–93. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

97

José Antonio Mazzotti Pérez-Mallaína Bueno, Pablo Emilio. 2001. Retrato de una ciudad en crisis. La sociedad limeña ante el movimiento sísmico de 1746. Sevilla: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas / Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Protzel, Javier. 2009. Lima imaginada. Imaginarios de la tradición y la modernidad. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la Universidad de Lima. Rowe, John Howland. (1954) 1976. “El movimiento nacional inca del siglo XVIII.” In Túpac Amaru II – 1780, edited by Alberto Flores Galindo, 13–66. Lima: Retablo de Papel Ediciones. Schwartz, Stuart. 1995. “Colonial Identities and Sociedad de Castas.” Colonial Latin American Review 4 (1): 185–201. Serje, Margarita. 2005. El revés de la nación: territorios salvajes, fronteras y tierras de nadie. Bogota: Universidad de los Andes. Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de. 1680. Theatro de Virtudes Politicas que con∫tituyen à un Principe: advertidas en los monarchas antiguos del Mexicano Imperio, con cuyas efigies ∫e hermoseó el Arco Triumphal que la muy noble, muy leal, imperial Ciudad de Mexico erigió para el digno recivimiento en ella del Excelenti∫∫imo Señor Virrey Conde Paredes, Marqués de la Laguna. Mexico City: por la Viuda de Bernardo Calderón. Suárez, Margarita. 2001. Desafíos transatlánticos. Mercaderes, banqueros y el estado en el Perú virreinal, 1600 –1700. Lima: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Walker, Charles. 2008. Shaky Colonialism:The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath. Durham: Duke University Press. Zamora, Margarita. 2010. “Sobre la cuestión de la raza en los Comentarios reales.” In Renacimiento mestizo: los 400 años de los Comentarios reales, edited by José Antonio Mazzotti, 361–380. Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert.

98

5 AN INTEGRATIONAL APPROACH TO COLONIAL SEMIOSIS Galen Brokaw

Introduction The reconceptualization of literary studies as cultural studies that occurred in the 1970s and 1980s expanded the field to include “non-literary” texts under the umbrella concepts of text and discourse and more general cultural products and practices. For Latin American colonial studies, Peter Hulme articulated this shift away from the strictly “literary” most explicitly in Colonial Encounters (1986) with his definition of colonial discourse as “an ensemble of linguistically-based practices unified by their common deployment in the management of colonial relationships” and that combines “the most formulaic and bureaucratic of official documents … with the most non-functional and unprepossessing of romantic novels … .” Subsequently Walter Mignolo proposed a further expansion from “colonial discourse” to “colonial semiosis” in order to reflect an even broader field to include signifying practices that take place through any given medium or sign carrier (1989; 1995). This includes Mesoamerican scripts, the Inca quipu, and other indigenous media. With the exception of Maya logo-syllabic script, indigenous American sign systems are usually classified as “not writing” along with all other sign systems that do not fit the traditional definition of writing as a representation of oral language. Societies that do not employ systems that qualify as writing are relegated to the speciously homogenous category of the oral (see Ong 2012; Goody 2000). Sign systems developed by so-called “oral” societies demand a theoretical reconceptualization that is attentive to the material specificity of the media upon which they do rely and their socio-economic, political, and cognitive effects. Approaching other sign systems from the perspective of materiality is particularly important for two reasons. First, all sign systems are inherently material. Even the sound waves that make up oral communication are material phenomena. Second, the material conditions under which we live and operate inevitably shape the dialogue between the way we think and the cultural, socio-economic, and political institutions that we construct.The dialogical model of media (Brokaw 2010b) provides an alternative to the orality-literacy binary. This model acknowledges the significance of the cognitive patterns and tendencies that derive from our relationship to alphabetic writing and that structure our thought; but it also provides the basis for a more nuanced understanding of the nature and effects of other types of media. But other types of sign systems also require a reconsideration of systematicity itself. Drawing on integrational linguistics, here I argue that the grammar of a sign system is the effect of communicative practices rather than the other way 99

Galen Brokaw

around. Approaching sign systems from this perspective sheds new light on the true nature not only of other media but also of our own.

Mesoamerican iconography One of the defining characteristics of the Mesoamerican region is the use of iconographic scripts. Mesoamerican scripts vary in many respects, but they share certain aesthetic qualities and semiotic conventions derived in many cases from common origins and/or the common cultural practices with which sign systems were integrated (Prem and Riese 1983; Urcid 2012). The mimetic nature of iconographic writing is much more accessible than the more esoteric signs of phonographic systems, but this accessibility is misleading: the mimetic imagery contains many nuances that remain either undeciphered or possibly even unrecognized as semiotic conventions. We do know that Mesoamerican societies developed a number of different iconographic genres that recorded detailed narratives, rituals, calendars, and geographic space. All signifying systems, whether alphabetic or iconographic, deploy their signifiers in particular ways that in and of themselves have significance. In the case of alphabetic script, for example, letters, newspaper articles, poems, novels, etc. all employ different formats associated with their genres independent of their content. For example, take the following pseudo-text that substitutes all letters with a generic “x”:

Xx xxxxx xxx xx xxxx x xxxxxxx xx xxxxxxx xx xxxxx xx xxxxxxx xxxxx, x xxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxxx, xxxxxxx, xxxxxxxx xx xxxxxxx x xx xxxxxxx; x xx xxxxx xxx xx xxxxxxx, xxx xx xx xxxx xxx xxx xx xxxxxxx, xxx xxxxx xxxxxx, xxx xx xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx, xxxxxxxx, xx xxxxxx xxxxx, xxxxxxx x xxxxxxxxx: xxxxx xx xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xx xxxxx xxxxx, xxxxx xxx xx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxx xx xxxxx xx xxxxxxx xxxxxx. Xxxxxxxxxx xx xxxx xx xxxxxx xxxxxx, xxxx xx xxxxxx xx xxxx xxxxxx xxx xx xxxxx xxxxxxx xx xx xxxxxxxxx.

This pseudo-text is modeled on a sonnet by the sixteenth-century Spanish poet Garcilaso de la Vega (Rivers 1966, 37–38), and is easily identified as a sonnet based merely on its format without the need for the actual words. For alphabetic texts, the format conveys the genre or type of text rather than any specific content. The conventional differences in format between different Mesoamerican iconographic genres is analogous to those between different alphabetic genres. Mixteca-Puebla-style ritual books such as the Codex Borgia are divided into sections that deal with different topics and exhibit unique formats. The calendar section (Figure 5.1), for example, is immediately distinguishable from that of the section on “marriage” prognostication based merely on the layout of the pages (Figure 5.2; see Anders, Jansen and Reyes García 1993, 309–322). Similar to the

100

An integrational approach to colonial semiosis

Figure 5.1  Page from the calendar section of the Códice Borgia. Códice Borgia. Vatican Library (1993), p. 3.

pseudo-poem above, these formats announce the nature of the content even without the content itself; and they condition the way the reader understands the text. Both alphabetic and iconographic scripts also employ structures to convey more specific information, but they do so in very different ways dictated by the nature of their sign systems. Aside from the layout created by line length, paragraphing, etc., the phonographic nature of alphabetic script necessarily requires the remediation or transpositioning of the temporality of oral speech into the spatiality of the material text. Alphabetic script essentially attempts to remediate individual sounds from the medium of oral speech to that of graphic signs.The relationship between the graphic signs and sounds is completely arbitrary, because sounds have no visible shape or form that can be reproduced graphically. These individual sounds convey no meaning in and of themselves, and this means that the material conventions convey no meaning either. Alphabetic texts do organize their contents according to higher level sequences (words, sentences, sequences of sentences, sequences of events, etc.), but the material form of the text does

101

Galen Brokaw

Figure 5.2  P  age from the marriage prognostication section of the Códice Borgia. Códice Borgia. Vatican Library (1993), p. 58.

not encode these sequences. In other words, the discursive conventions at that level are not transpositioned into the material conventions of the medium. The iconographic mode of Mesoamerican scripts, on the other hand, inherently remediates the natural and social world by virtue of its mimetic nature, and it also employs multiple conventions and codes, what I have called polygraphy or semiotic heterogeneity (Brokaw 2010a, 120– 123; 2010b, 118–120; see also Marcus 1992: 17–27). The heterogeneity of iconographic writing results in a different type of semiosis with different effects. Mesoamerican narrative histories such as the Mixteca-Puebla-style Codex Nuttall, for example, rely upon units of signification that correspond to places, people, and events.The first page of what is known as the 8-Deer narrative (Figure 5.3), illustrates the nature of this genre of iconography.The narrative begins in the lower right-hand corner, and follows a vertical boustrophedon pattern indicated by the red lines. The first scene establishes the place where the narrative begins: the black and white checkered base of the temple is the signifier for Tilantongo. The next scene represents the marriage of Lady 102

An integrational approach to colonial semiosis

Figure 5.3  F  irst page of the 8-Deer narrative. Códice Zouche-Nuttall. British Museum, Ms. 39671 (1992), p. 42.

9-Eagle/Wreath of Cacao Flowers and Lord 5-Lizard/Rain-Sun. In this scene, the position of the figures seated and facing each other, and perhaps the hand gestures, indicate that they get married. The following three figures represent the birth of this couple’s children. In the final figure on the page, another woman named Lady 11-Water sits on a stool similar to that of Lady 9-Eagle. This is Lord 5-Lizard’s second wife followed by their children on the next page (Códice Zouche-Nuttall. British Museum, Ms. 39671 (1992); The Codex Nuttall 1975, 42–43). Each of the marriage and birth scenes are dated using a day glyph and a series of small circles corresponding to a calendrical number between one and thirteen. In some cases the year is also specified with a glyph and number superimposed over what looks like the letter “A” intertwined with a rectangle. The day sign and number function both as the date of birth and as one of the names of the individual. Other styles of Mesoamerican iconography, such as that evident in the Codex Xolotl (Figure 5.4), employ different conventions and demonstrate the highly versatile nature of this sign system. These iconographic texts convey meaning through both conventions specific to the sign system and conventions transpositioned from the social and/or natural world represented.The boustrophedon format of the Codex Nuttall, for example, is a medium-specific innovation developed in a dialogue between the message conveyed, the nature of the sign system, and the material constraints of the codex form. The people and objects represented are highly conventionalized, but to some extent they are transpositioned from the socio-political world which has its own conventions. The mimetic iconography remediates these social conventions in combination with 103

Galen Brokaw

Figure 5.4  Lámina 1 of the Códice Xolotl. Biblioteque Nacionale de France (1996).

media-specific conventions. The spatial configuration of the two figures conveys the marriage, and the simple presence of individuals following this marriage all make evident the meaning of the text even without the specific identity of the individuals involved. In other words, the configuration and order of the images constitute an iconographic morphology and syntax that encodes semantic information within the structure itself. If we were to create a pseudo-text based on the page from the Codex Nuttall as I have done above using a sonnet by Garcilaso de la Vega, the reader could actually glean some of the content as opposed to merely the genre of the text.

Andean Quipu Andean societies also developed a number of different sign systems that conveyed different types of information, but the knotted string device called quipu (also spelled khipu) has garnered the most attention as a medium that functioned in a way analogous to writing (Figure 5.5). This device consists of a relatively thick main cord to which thinner cords are attached and organized into groupings that correspond to information categories and organizational structures (Murra 1975). These cords were made primarily from dyed or undyed cotton or camelid fiber. In most cases, knots tied into the cords of Inca-era quipus consistently employ a decimal place system to record numbers. But some quipus or sections of quipus also exhibit knots that do not conform to the regular conventions of the decimal place system (Urton 2002, 184–191). 104

An integrational approach to colonial semiosis

Figure 5.5  Inca Quipu. Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Antropología e Historia del Perú.

The quipu clearly exhibits a high degree of semiotic heterogeneity: we know that Inca quipus relied upon the decimal system, colors, and cord configuration; they also may have employed cord attachment direction (Conklin 1982, 266; Urton 2003, 69–74) and knot direction (Urton 1994, 2003, 74–88), which Sabine Hyland has documented in a quipu board from late colonial times (Hyland et al. 2014). We could create a representation of a pseudo-quipu analogous to the pseudo-poem given above, but as in the case of Mesoamerican iconography, the format of the cords on a quipu is not merely ancillary. It would certainly indicate the genre of the quipu, but for at least some types of quipu, it may also inherently reveal the content which appears in an order dictated by a hierarchy of ethnocategories (Murra 1975). Similar to iconographic morphology and syntax, the format itself encodes information rather than merely packaging it.

A media-studies approach to the orality-literacy binary These indigenous American sign systems challenge what we think we know about the nature of representation and the semiotics of secondary media, and they demand a reconceptualization that deconstructs the writing/non-writing and orality/literacy binaries. The role that colonial Latin American literary/cultural studies plays in this project was announced by Mignolo’s call to expand and reconceptualize our field as colonial semiosis; but long before this shift from literature to discourse to semiosis, orality-literacy studies, and more specifically media studies which arose from it, drew attention to the importance of the materiality of the medium of communication. The distinction here is not between the material and the non-material, because strictly speaking oral language is also a material phenomenon. The essential idea that informs the field of media studies is that the material nature of the medium affects the nature of human cognition. 105

Galen Brokaw

However, the nature of the medium does not necessarily take into account the nature of the practice or practices associated with it. The thought, language, and discourses of “oral” societies exhibit certain characteristics by virtue of their primary orality. And the thought, language, and discourses of “literate” societies tend to exhibit different characteristics that are attributed to the cognitive effects of literacy. However, Brian Street has argued that at this general level, this distinction homogenizes both oral and written traditions in ways that obscure differences between diverse oral and literate practices which are determined in both cases more by ideology than the nature of the medium (Street 1984). I would argue that this does not mean that such dichotomies and categorizations are always unjustified but rather that they must be understood as contingent and heuristic rather than essential and definitive (Brokaw 2010b). Keeping this contingency in mind, the heuristic validity of the orality-literacy dichotomy is not based merely on the difference between oral discourse and alphabetic writing per se. First and foremost, it is based on the fundamental difference between ephemeral, dynamic media on the one hand and more or less static and permanent media on the other (Harris 1995, 43-4).The field of media studies recognizes that the nature of any given medium has cognitive implications, whether ephemeral or permanent. In other words, even different types of ephemeral media such as radio and television have implications for both individuals and societies. Ephemerality and permanence are qualities with effects or tendencies that can be generalized in many, if not all, cases. This perspective does not deny the significance of alphabetic literacy as opposed to so-called primary orality, but it places this difference within a much broader context rather than a narrow dichotomy. The development of phonography, particularly alphabetic systems, has important implications that often justify a conceptual distinction for certain purposes. But defining writing strictly as phonography creates a binary opposition between phonographic writing and nonphonographic sign systems that obfuscates the significance of the latter.This is particularly problematic, because it corresponds to, and is the basis for, the value-laden distinction between so-called oral cultures and literate civilizations. It is for this reason that Elizabeth Hill Boone argues for a much broader definition of writing that includes scripts like Mesoamerican iconography (Boone 2000, 29–30). Even with this broader definition of writing, we still need a theoretical model that would account for the observable differences in function and effect of different sign systems. Elsewhere, I have argued for the extension of the media-studies model to other societies that have been considered to be oral in spite of the fact that they employ communicative media (Brokaw 2010a). Descriptions of indigenous American societies (and many other non-European cultures) tend to emphasize difference over similarity, and descriptions of other cultures commonly rely upon the perceived presence or absence of writing as one of the primary bases for this difference. But the dichotomization of societies into the oral and the literate fails to acknowledge the important functions and effects of other sign systems and their media. The identification of a society as “oral” defines it in terms of what it is not rather than in terms of what it is (Brokaw 2010b, 121). The media-studies approach avoids this problem as well as the implied value judgments identified by Boone, because in principle it gives equal weight to all sign systems. Sign systems other than those traditionally defined as writing have an interest in and of themselves for epigraphers, anthropologists, sociologists, and media-studies scholars, and even for “literary” scholars insofar as they constitute a form of discourse broadly conceived. For “literary” scholars who conceive of their field based on the fact that “literature” derives etymologically from the Latin “littera” (letters), this means that technically anything recorded using letters falls within the realm of “literature.” The essential idea behind the notion of “literature” as opposed to other forms of written language was at least in part that form is somehow more important or central to literary works (i.e., novels, poems, stories). Some literary works certainly 106

An integrational approach to colonial semiosis

foreground form in ways that other genres of discourse do not, but this is not always the case. Conversely, form often functions in literary genres in the same way as any other “non-literary” genre. To put it another way, all uses of written language are in this sense literary, because they must rely upon form. And other sign systems are just as inherently dependent upon formal conventions. Any given medium has numerous features or characteristics that are available for use as formal signifying conventions. Even differences between oral languages illustrate not only the variability of formal conventions but also the variability of the resources available that can be formally conventionalized in the medium of oral speech. Tonal languages like Chinese and Zapotec, for example, avail themselves of tone in ways that non-tonal languages do not. In addition to the more formalized conventions of verbal language, communicative practices integrate a variety of paralinguistic conventions that qualify, supplement, and in some cases replace, verbal language. The use of these paralinguistic conventions creates a dynamic that impacts the way language functions. The remediation of oral language into alphabetic script eliminates some of its linguistic and all of its paralinguistic conventions and practices, because they are either impractical to transposition into graphic inscription or incompatible with this medium. The elimination of these paralinguistic conventions isolates verbal language from all of the other elements of the communicative operation that worked in conjunction with it.The verbal discourse that remains after this isolation is not able to convey meaning with the same level of efficacy. Thus, alphabetic writing attempts to compensate for what was lost through the development and use of mediumspecific conventions in order to meet the needs of the communicative functions that it is designed to perform. For example, the consistent spacing between every word in alphabetic writing does not have an analogous oral convention in regular speech. To run most words together with intermittent spaces to indicate pauses would better reflect the conventions of normal oral discourse; and early manuscripts often do not separate words using spaces in a regular way. The convention of word spacing resolves possible confusions that may arise in written script precisely because it is visual instead of auditory. Furthermore, the emic nature of word spacing facilitates more rapid comprehension, because it better reflects how readers conceive of the semantic units of language in their heads. Additionally, the disembodied nature of alphabetic writing requires written language to be more thorough and explicit than the verbal language of oral communication because meaning cannot be created and negotiated as part of the communicative interaction itself. Rather, the writer must create meaning independently from, and prior to, the act of reading and in such a way that the reader can recreate more or less the same meaning based solely on the written text. In the European medieval and early modern periods, most of these conventions had not been standardized in written script. Word spacing, capitalization, and punctuation all occurred often in free variation, particularly in notarial documents. Print conventions inherently involved a move toward a more standardized set of conventions both in terms of page format and the other non-semantic conventions of spacing, capitalization, and punctuation. Print facilitated the creation of a much larger reading public, but the nature of the printing process also concentrated the production of texts in fewer hands.The size of the reading public had an inverse relationship to the number of text producers. The material nature of printing already standardizes alphabetic script across a large number of texts eliminating the idiosyncrasies of individual scribes. The concentration of text production in the hands of printers resulted in even further standardization of textual conventions. Today these conventions have become explicit rules that are learned as an inherent part of reading and writing, and once learned they feel natural. They do not convey information in the 107

Galen Brokaw

same way as words, sentences, or entire texts, but they serve to shape or condition the meaning of these semantic conventions. The layout of a text such as the pseudo-sonnet given above creates a certain disposition in the reader to identify and interpret it in a particular way. Punctuation can change the meaning of an entire sentence in any kind of text. The popular meme “Let’s eat, Grandpa” v. “Let’s eat Grandpa” is a humorous example. But missing or misplaced commas have been at the heart of more serious communicative interactions as well. In one recent lawsuit, drivers for a dairy in Maine won a judgment based on the absence of a comma in Maine’s law governing overtime pay (O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy 2017). The role of these conventions demonstrates the way in which alphabetic writing attempts to compensate for the impoverishment that takes place when language is remediated into alphabetic script. Interpersonal communication is a multi-dimensional activity that integrates not only different media (e.g., verbal language, facial expressions, gestures), but also different features of these media (e,g., tone, rate of speech). Alphabetic writing compensates for what is lost in oral communication to the extent that it can through the use of conventions such as the standardization of discrete sentence structures and punctuation. The potential need for such compensation arises whenever a sign system is remediated, that is to say transpositioned from one medium (e.g., orality) to another (e.g., writing). We witness this same phenomenon in the digital age. Anyone who communicates by email or text message knows that it is often notoriously difficult to interpret the intended meaning of alphabetic texts because tone and other contextual indicators are lost.This is in part what drove the development of emojis. A sentence with a smiling face at the end often conveys a very different message than one without this emoji. This development occurred not just because alphabetic writing was insufficient. The advent of electronic media moved, or extended, a lot of interpersonal communication that used to take place in face-to-face or phone conversations into emails and text messages. This new medium was not only conducive to new conventions but also actually required innovations and adaptations in order to effectively transposition previously analog communicative tasks into the new digital media. This reference to “transpositioning” or “remediation” should not be understood to mean that alphabetic language merely recreates more enduring versions of ephemeral oral discourses. Alphabetic writing may certainly transcribe the strictly verbal component of oral discourses, but that is not what it was originally designed to do. The impetus and development of writing arose from the need to communicate or remember information across time and space. But the initial objects and activities that would eventually give rise to alphabetic writing were not representations of language at all (Schmandt-Besserat 1992; Daniels 1996, 3). And when they began to represent language, the communicative functions that writing fulfilled would have been new and unique to the medium. The record of numerical data inscribed in early writing systems, for example, had no corresponding oral counterpart.To take a more modern example, letter writing had no oral equivalent. It is a genre of written discourse that was made possible by, and is unique to, the alphabetic sign system and the medium of ink and paper. Text messaging has a much more direct oral counterpart, but even so this communicative practice inevitably develops its own unique conventions specific to the medium. In this discussion I have attempted to maintain a distinction between sign system and medium or what Mignolo calls sign carrier (Mignolo 1995). In many cases, these are two separate things: alphabetic writing, for example, is a sign system that is not necessarily bound by a particular medium. The qualities mentioned above of ephemerality and permanence are features of media rather than sign systems. Alphabetic writing can be performed on a computer, in the sand, or in the air using gestures or smoke. Thus it is not the sign system that makes writing more or less permanent. It is the medium or sign carrier. The term orality refers metonymically to oral 108

An integrational approach to colonial semiosis

language, but the more literal meaning of orality as medium is actually more appropriate from the theoretical perspective of media studies. The nature of the sign system is also significant, but it must be understood in the context of the medium that supports it. In the same way that different conventions of oral discourse have different effects, not only different media but also variations of the same medium have different potential effects independent of the sign system. This is the essential idea of Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum “The medium is the message” (McLuhan 1994, 7–21). So in the move from handwritten manuscripts to printed books, the sign system remains the same, but the medium undergoes changes that have important effects (Eisenstein 1980) inflected by ideology (Street 1984). In the recent past, the advent of computers transformed the way alphabetic texts were written and read; and more recently, cell phones and tablets have led to an even more radical transformation in the nature of alphabetic communication. Unlike traditional alphabetic genres, one can argue that text messaging has a counterpart in interpersonal oral dialogue. Nevertheless, they are not the same. Texting is a kind of digital version of an oral conversation, but it is a unique genre specific to the digital medium with its own conventions. Writing or printing on paper disembodies language and separates the addresser from the addressee in both time and space. Texting also disembodies language, but it separates the addresser from the addressee in space, not necessarily in time. The temporal immediacy of texting induces the development of a genre analogous to the oral genre of interpersonal dialogue. As in the case of written and printed language, it must compensate for what is lost when the language is disembodied, but the immediacy of the communication and the materiality of the digital medium lead to compensations very different from those that characterize graphic inscription and print. Abbreviations such as “lol,”“rofl,”“lmao,” for example, are not digital expressions of actual laughter in an analogous interpersonal dialogue. They are unique texting conventions that serve a phatic function and convey the positive disposition of the addressee toward the content of a message. Even for the period prior to the digital age, the distinction between the sign system of alphabetic writing and the medium of graphic inscription is important. The acknowledgment that the medium must be considered independent from the sign system allows for an analytical model that can correlate variations in the medium (e.g., handwriting v. print) with different effects; and this is one of the bases for the field of book history. The shift from hand-written manuscripts to printed books has effects that go beyond efficiency and practical utility; and the more recent development of computers and smart phones further transforms communicative practices with corresponding effects. The transformation that has been occurring in the modern digital age brings with it certain ironies. Pictography played an important role at an early stage in the development of the first writing systems (Schmandt-Besserat 1992, 120–121), and modern text messaging returns to a partial reliance upon pictography in the form of emojis as one of the techniques that compensates for the disembodiment of language. In a sense, some emojis reembody language pictorially in order to convey meaning, intent, or attitudes that are not normally communicated through, or are more efficient than, verbal language. So digital media begins incorporating pictorial imagery as a way of increasing the communicative effectiveness of the sign system.

Rational and aesthetic modes of communication We might characterize the original move from pictorial representation to phonography as a move from a more “aesthetic” to a more “rational” mode of representation. And the incorporation of pictorial imagery in modern text messaging constitutes a partial move back to a more aesthetic mode of communication. The distinction drawn here between aesthetic and rational 109

Galen Brokaw

should not be understood as hierarchical or value laden; and these are not absolute descriptors. “Rational” in this context refers to the predetermined, codified semiotic conventions that convey meaning or intent. Roy Harris argues that “conceptions of human rationality vary according to the view of language adopted” (Harris 2013b, xiv); and the dominant modern view of language as a codified system of rules is the product of a rationality that derives from alphabetic literacy (Linell 2005). On the other hand, “aesthetic,” which derives from “aesthesis” meaning “sense perception,” refers here not to the question of beauty but rather to communicative practices that constitute their rules and conventions (for lack of better terms) in the act of communication. The theoretical but non-existent absolutely rational system would be an absolutely codified system that exhibited no free variation and no extraneous elements. An absolutely aesthetic practice, on the other hand, would have no predetermined rules or conventions, and would be limited at best to invoking feelings or intuitions. All sign systems lie somewhere on the continuum between these two extremes and have both rational and aesthetic dimensions. Even predominantly “rational” signing practices never exhaust the resources that their media make available. More importantly, they never operate in a completely logical and consistent way. They exhibit features that users can play or innovate with either for purely aesthetic effect or in order to modify, add to, or expand the meaning or intent that they wish to convey. This means that communication is never reducible to the rational dimension of the sign system. What I am calling the aesthetic mode of communication involves inherent and inevitable innovations that modify or add to the meaning that is constructed, even with the predetermined rules of “rational” systems. All communicative practices rely to one degree or another upon what can be described after the fact as rules and conventions.The essential question is the extent to which they operate in an aesthetic mode and constitute those rules in the act of communication versus a rational mode that relies on predetermined ones. A sign system such as alphabetic script that is based on the representation of the individual sounds of oral language must rely heavily on predetermined rules. At the most basic level, readers must learn through prior instruction the arbitrary relationship between letters and sounds. Furthermore, as explained above, the remediation of European oral languages into alphabetic script, particularly with the advent of printing in the early modern period, induced the formalization of grammatical rules and stylistic conventions that serve as the basis for the modern concept of language as linguistic system. The claim here is not that oral language employed no grammatical structures prior to writing and print but rather that such structures did not have the same force or linguistic ontology that they acquired through the formalization of official grammatical rules and conventions. Systems of grammatical rules can be abstracted from any language, but these abstractions do not feed back into linguistic practice in the same way prior to their explicit formalization as rules and conventions. Language did not exist in the same way prior to this formalization. Integrationist linguists such as Roy Harris claim that no such thing as a language exists in the first place (Harris 2013a, 25–28), but the institutionalization of grammar and style induces a change in linguistic practice. The transpositioning of oral language into alphabetic writing took the semiotic functions of communication, which had been dispersed, and concentrated them in verbal language. The isolation of the verbal component of communication induced a formalization and standardization of linguistic practice that came to be understood as a priori rules and conventions. The formalization and standardization of these rules and conventions was then projected back onto, and attributed to, oral language. This projection then serves as the basis for the metaphysical conceptualization of language as a system of rules (Linell 2005, 142–146). This perspective on language is thoroughly conditioned by alphabetic writing, and it induces the expectation that other sign systems will be similarly rational rather than aesthetic (Linell 2005, 122–123). 110

An integrational approach to colonial semiosis

From this perspective unfamiliar sign systems present several difficulties for decipherment. Approaches to decipherment are based primarily on the assumption that communicative practices are reducible to fixed codes. In other words, they focus on the rational, analytic dimension of a sign system, and they ignore the aesthetic dimension. The first step in this process is to determine which features are “rational” or conventional and thus need deciphering and which are merely aesthetic and thus can be ignored in terms of decipherment.The assumption that the communicative practices of a sign system must conform to predetermined rules and conventions is a perspective characteristic of societies with more or less strictly codified rules and conventions. In contrast, the social, economic, and political institutions of many societies do not depend upon such strict codification. The codification of grammatical and stylistic rules that occurred with alphabetic writing might inevitably occur with any sign system that relied upon an asynchronous secondary medium that disembodied the communicative act under the same socio-economic and political conditions. But the nature of the codification would vary with the nature of the sign system, the particular nature of the disembodiment, and the social nature of the production and reception of signs. Any communicative interaction must rely to some extent upon a kind of agreement between the addresser and the addressee with regard to what signs mean and how they relate to each other. In direct, primary, or synchronous communicative interactions (e.g., face-to-face conversations), this agreement is constantly negotiated and renegotiated. The rules and conventions that can be abstracted from communicative practices are often more tendencies and inclinations than rules. It is only when institutions of power such as schools, newspapers, and publishers begin imposing and enforcing official rules that grammatical and stylistic systems take on their rigidly predetermined quality. And typically, some form of secondary medium facilitates the development of these institutions. Then the strength of such systems leads us to project back onto language a rigid systematicity that was only constituted as such by the process of abstraction and institutionalization. The more enduring nature of secondary signing practices may be more conducive to the development of more codified sign systems and their accompanying institutions, but the nature of the medium and the ideological practices associated with it contribute to the degree to which this happens. Phonographic writing is particularly prone to such codification, because it isolates the sound system at a level of specificity that requires its own differential logic independent from any meaning. In modern alphabetic societies, socio-political institutions impose rigidly codified rules of grammar and style that regulate the negotiation of meaning. This results from the interaction between the socio-political institutions, their particular ideologies, and the media through which they perpetuate themselves. In so-called more traditional societies, what signs mean and how they communicate meaning are often less determined because the institutions that regulate semiotic functions tend to be less monolithic. The signifying practices of such societies are inherently more aesthetic in the sense that they allow for more originality: they simultaneously negotiate meaning and the practices that produce it. Their communicative practices are not always as strictly governed by a priori rules; they are often more free to constitute the rules upon which communication is based in the communicative act itself.

Aesthesis and rationality in indigenous American sign systems Insofar as iconographic sign systems transposition the reality and the communicative acts of everyday life, they will inherently involve aesthetic practices to a greater extent than sign systems such as alphabetic script.The mimetic nature of iconography makes it inherently more aesthetic because the relationship between signifier and referent is determined by the mimetic mode.This 111

Galen Brokaw

is not to say that iconographic scripts may not have rules and conventions, whether explicitly formalized or not. The process of transpositioning the natural and social world into mimetic images will necessarily induce a certain level of reflexivity conducive to more formalized conventionalization. Elsewhere I have argued that iconography relies upon and further develops the cultural codes inherent in the images that it transpositions in ways analogous to how alphabetic script relies upon and further develops linguistic codes and conventions (Brokaw 2010b). But the mimetic nature of the medium allows for the introduction of signs and relationships between signs without necessarily the same kind of propaedeutic instruction required by sign systems in which the relationship between signifiers and referents are arbitrary. An iconographic sign system will still engage in practices that potentially can be abstracted into rules and conventions, even highly complex ones; but the nature of mimesis and the intuitive relationship between iconographic signs and their referents allow for a much more aesthetic mode of communication that maintains a role for innovation rather than relying strictly upon predetermined rules. This is one of the reasons why Mesoamerican scribes were so easily able to adapt iconographic scripts for new purposes in the colonial period. Figure 5.6, for example, presents a bill of sale in iconographic script from 1562 for a plot of land near Tomatlan, Mexico (Brokaw 1998). This particular genre did not exist in pre-Hispanic times; but even without previous familiarity with the conventions employed (which are based on pre-Hispanic practices) a basic understanding of the cultural context makes the document relatively easy to read. The plot of land is marked by four stakes at each corner. The hand icons extending from the posts on the lower and left edges signal the size of the plot. The heads of a man and a woman inside the boundaries of the plot represent the buyers.The circles represent the purchase price of ten pesos. The eight smaller circles within each peso represent tomines, the unit of currency equal to an eighth of a peso. These tomines help insure the identification of the larger circles as pesos. To the left of the plot, the first head presents the owner of the land, and the fact that his eyes are closed indicates that he is deceased. The head below him connected by a dotted line to the pesos represents the community official who administered the sale and received payment.The eight heads on the other side of the road on the right side of the page indicate members of the community who served as witnesses to the sale. This document combines pre-Hispanic conventions such as the closed eyes to represent death with colonial-era innovations that create new signs and conventions to represent new objects and phenomena such as the pesos and the principle of private land ownership. Iconographic scripts inherently lend themselves to this type of aesthetic mode, but abstract systems can do so as well. Frank Salomon has identified precisely this type of phenomenon in the staff code of the Andean village of Tupicocha (Salomon 2001). The minor political office holders in the community of Tupicocha are selected by the community for one-year terms of service. Each of the offices is associated with a staff created each year specifically for the office holder and inscribed with an identifying inscription made up of three possible symbols that can appear individually or in groupings. At community events where these office holders play a role, they lay out and organize their staffs prior to the event in order to determine the hierarchy appropriate for that particular context. Both the combination and sequence of symbols or symbol groupings corresponding to each office and the hierarchy in any given situation is highly variable. Salomon argues that contrary to the nature of most sign systems which consist of a fixed code that can produce varying messages, the Tupicocha staff system employs a variable code to produce a fixed message: the general social structure of the message will always be the same, but the configuration of signs that produce that message may vary depending on the socio-economic and political context at the time (Salomon 2001, 12–13). Salomon emphasizes the fact that the official acceptance of individual staff inscriptions at the beginning of the year 112

An integrational approach to colonial semiosis

Figure 5.6  Tomatlan bill of sale. Lilly Library, Indiana University.

and the arrangement of the staffs for specific events occur with little to no verbal language (2001, 9–11). The staff-code practice plays out in a socio-political context in which the participants are all present. As such, the nature of the practice is an interesting example of a material medium integrated into the social interactions that it is designed to support and facilitate. The Tupicocha staff code differs significantly from other sign systems, but it also demonstrates on a smaller scale the primordial nature of any given practice of signification. Essentially, signifiers are resources for the communication of intention. These signifiers originate in a 113

Galen Brokaw

process that negotiates meaning. The initial innovation that produces successful communication may set precedents that develop into conventions. Institutions of power may then convert these conventions into rules; but all rules and conventions of communication (the meaning of individual words, grammar structures, stylistic conventions, and so forth) necessarily originated in a primordial conversion of pure aesthesis into semiosis.The conventionalization and institutionalization of the original practice disguises that origin, but it remains nonetheless. An understanding of the primordial nature of communication as an integrated practice as opposed to the deployment of an autonomous fixed code and the various ways in which such practices can develop (including into fixed codes) has important implications not only for approaching the work of decipherment but also for understanding what decipherment even means. Traditional epigraphy approaches decipherment under the assumption that sign systems function as fixed codes. Semiotically homogenous and asynchronous systems such as modern alphabetic script inherently tend toward the development of fixed codes, and therefore they would be highly susceptible to epigraphic analysis. And to some extent all signifying practices have “rational” elements that can be understood at any given moment as a fixed code that lends itself to an epigraphic methodology. But communicative practices that rely upon more aesthetic modes of communication are not susceptible to epigraphic analysis in the same way precisely because they are not fixed.Thus if a particular medium or sign carrier with its associated signifying system operates on the aesthetic end of the continuum, then epigraphic analysis must acknowledge the inevitably limited, incomplete, and contingent nature of its findings. This argument does not set up a strict opposition between the “rationality” of European alphabetic writing and the “aesthetics” of indigenous American signifying practices. All communicative practices and signifying systems exhibit both rational and aesthetic characteristics. The quipus employed by the Inca state appears to have functioned in a highly “rational” system. And Maya logo-syllabic script inherently involves at least in part a fixed code by virtue of its phonographic nature. Even the iconographic scripts of other Mesoamerican societies employed standardized conventions to one degree or another. Furthermore, literacy in Mesoamerica and the Andes was almost certainly as complex, if not more so, than it was in Europe in the sixteenth century. In modern societies with universal education, literacy tends to be seen as an either/or phenomenon. This is less true than we tend to think, but a basic knowledge of reading does give one a certain level of access to any text. This was not always the case with Mesoamerican iconography or the Inca quipu. The various genres of these media would have employed conventions in distinct ways or even different sets of conventions. Mesoamerican scribes may have been well-versed in all aspects and levels of their respective sign systems, but the masses would have exhibited different levels of literacy depending on their particular role in society. All levels of society may have understood to some extent the iconography built into public architecture, but a thorough and detailed reading of ritual books would have required more specialized knowledge. In the case of the Andes, we cannot talk about the quipu as a monolithic system either: the evidence suggests that different levels of quipu literacy operated in a wide array of social, economic, and political spheres, from shepherds who maintained records of their flocks to imperial historians who recorded histories of the Inca rulers (Brokaw 2010a, 121–23).

Conclusion An understanding of both the nature of indigenous American media (their rational and aesthetic dimensions) and the nature of their particular literacies has important implications for our understanding of pre-Hispanic and colonial contexts and the methodologies that we use to 114

An integrational approach to colonial semiosis

study them. Any project that involves “reading” an indigenous sign system must necessarily attempt to understand the interplay between rational and aesthetic practices. At the very least, it must keep in mind the difference between these two modes and the limitations of traditional epigraphic approaches. The aesthetic nature of many indigenous American signifying practices may mean that we will never be able to completely decipher them; and acknowledging this may at least help avoid both mistakenly reductive and speciously authoritative readings. Moreover, this theoretical perspective must inform our understanding of the way in which indigenous American discourses interacted with alphabetic script in the colonial period. Both European and indigenous discourses were transpositioned into the sign systems and media of the other. Mesoamerican iconographic and Andean quipu-based histories were transcribed into alphabetic script (Brokaw 1998, 2003, 2010a, 127–163). European genres such as the bill of sale (carta de venta) and the title (título) were produced in iconographic script alongside alphabetic versions (Brotherston et al. 1997; Brokaw 1998). And confessions and religious prayers were encoded on quipu (Harrison 2002; Charles 2007; Brokaw 2010a, 226–234). This transpositioning from one medium into another always results in a transformation.Thus, we must be attentive to the shifts that occur when this happens and to the socio-cultural and political contexts that inform the processes of both production and reception of such texts. Equally important, however, is the way that such an understanding sheds light on the true nature of our own signifying practices. The codification of conventions into rules induced by the nature of alphabetic writing and the institutionalization of literacy was not merely a benign transpositioning of the material phenomenon of oral language into the materiality of ink and paper. The voluminous scholarship on literacy, print, and other kinds of media elucidates the powerful interplay between material forms on the one hand and human cognition and socioeconomic and political institutions on the other. The integrationist perspective that informs the theoretical model presented here does not deny the significance of this interplay. Rather, it highlights the way in which the institutionalization of writing and print obscures the primordial nature of all forms of communication and the media that support them.The challenge posed by non-phonographic sign systems like Mesoamerican iconography and the Andean quipu is not always first and foremost the logical decipherment of a code or sign system but rather the overcoming of the biases derived from alphabetic writing in our conceptualization of the nature of communication and what makes it possible.

Works cited Anders, Ferdinand, Maarten Jansen, and Luis Reyes García. 1993. Los templos del cielo y de la oscuridad: Oráculos y liturgia. Libro explicativo del llamado Códice Borgia. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Brokaw, Galen. 1998.“Indigenous and European Discursive Modes in Colonial Mexican Land Documents.” Indiana Journal of Hispanic Literatures 13: 105–110. ———. 2003. “The Poetics of Khipu Historiography: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala and the Relación de los quipucamayos.” Latin American Research Review 38 (3): 111–147. ———. 2010a. A History of the Khipu. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2010b. “Indigenous American Polygraphy and the Dialogic Model of Media.” Ethnohistory 57 (1): 117–133. Brotherston, Gordon, Galen Brokaw, Aaron Dziubisnkyj, Millie Gimmel, and Mark Morris. 1997. Footprints Through Time: Mexican Pictorial Manuscripts at the Lilly Library. Bloomington, IN: Lilly Library. Boone, Elizabeth Hill. 2000. Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs. Austin: University of Texas Press. Charles, John. 2007. “Unreliable Confessions: Khipus in the Colonial Parish.” The Americas 64 (1): 11–33. Códice Borgia. Vatican Library. 1993. Edited by Ferdinand Anders, Maarten Jansen, and Luis Reyes García. Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt / Sociedad Estatal Quinto Centenario / Fondo de Cultura Económica (Mexico).

115

Galen Brokaw Códice Xolotl. Biblioteque Nacionale de France. 1996. Edited by Charles E. Dibble. México: Gobierno del Estado de México / H. LII Legislatura de México / UNAM / Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura. Códice Zouche-Nuttall. British Museum, Ms. 39671. 1992. Edited by Ferdinand Anders, Maarten Jansen, and Luis Reyes García. Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt / Sociedad Estatal Quinto Centenario / Fondo de Cultura Económica (Mexico). Conklin, William. 1982. “The Information System of Middle Horizon Quipus.” In Ethnoastronomy and Archaeoastronomy in the American Tropics, edited by Anthony F. Aveni and Gary Urton, 261–281. New York: New York Academy of Sciences. Daniels, Peter T. 1996. “The Study of Writing Systems.” In The World’s Writing Systems, edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, 3-17. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eisenstein, Elizabeth. 1980. The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Goody, Jack. 2000. The Power of the Written Tradition. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Harris, Roy. 1995. Signs of Writing. London: Routledge. ———. 2013a. Integrationist Notes and Papers 2013. Bedfordshire, UK: Bright Pen. ———. 2013b. Rationality and the Literate Mind. London: Routledge. Harrison, Regina. 2002. “Pérez Bocanegra’s Ritual Formulario: Khipu Knots and Confession.” In Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu, edited by Jeffrey Quilter and Gary Urton, 266–290. Austin: University of Texas Press. Hulme, Peter. 1986. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797. London: Methuen. Hyland, Sabine, Gene A.Ware, and Madison Clark. 2014. “Knot Direction in a Khipu/Alphabetic Text from the Central Andes.” Latin American Antiquity 25 (2): 189–197. Linell, Per. 2005. The Written Language Bias in Linguistics: Its Nature, Origins, and Transformations. London: Routledge. Marcus, Joyce. 1992. Mesoamerican Writing Systems: Propaganda, Myth, and History in Four Ancient Civilizations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. McLuhan, Marshall. 1994. Understanding Media:The Extensions of Man. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mignolo, Walter. 1989. “Afterward: From Discourse to Colonial Semiosis.” Dispositio 14 (36–38): 333–337. ———. 1995. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Murra, John V. 1975. “Las etnocategorías de un khipu estatal.” In Formaciones económicas y políticas del mundo andino,” edited by John Murra, 243–254. Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos. Nuttall, Zelia, ed. 1975. The Codex Nuttall. New York: Dover. O’Connor v. Oakhurst Dairy. No. 16-1901. 2017. US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. https://law. justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca1/16-1901/16-1901-2017-03-20.html. Accessed 15 Sept, 2018. Ong, Walter. 2012. Orality and Literacy:The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge. Prem, Hanns J., and Bertold Riese. 1983. “Autochthonous American Writing Systems:The Aztec and Maya Examples.” In Writing in Focus, edited by Florian Coulmas and Kourad Ehlich, 167–186. Berlin: Mouton. Rivers, Elias L. 1966. Renaissance and Baroque Poetry of Spain. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Salomon, Frank. 2001. “How an Andean ‘Writing Without Words’ Works.” Current Anthropology 42 (1): 1–27. Schmandt-Besserat, Denise. 1992. How Writing Came About. Austin: University of Texas Press. Street, Brian. 1984. Literacy in Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Urcid, Javier. 2012. “Scribal Traditions from Highland Mesoamerica (300-1000 AD).” In Mesoamerican Archaeology, edited by Deborah L. Nichols and Christopher Pool, 855–868. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Urton, Gary. 1994. “A New Twist in an Old Yarn: Variation in Knot Directionality in the Inka Khipus.” Baessler-Archiv Neue Folge 42: 271–305. ———. 2002. “Recording Signs in Narrative Accounting Khipu.” In Narrative Threads: Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu, edited by Jeffry Quilter and Gary Urton, 171–196. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2003. Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records. Austin: University of Texas Press.

116

6 LATIN AMERICAN AND CARIBBEAN COLONIAL STUDIES AND/IN THE DECOLONIAL TURN Nelson Maldonado-Torres

A wide array of publications in the last 15–20 years indicate the emergence, solidification, and continued expansion of a decolonial turn in theory, scholarly research, and critique. The decolonial turn considers that modern Western colonialism and its legacies are central to the understanding of Western modernity, and that decolonization can be regarded not merely as an event, but more fundamentally, as an attitude and an unfinished project (Maldonado-Torres 2017a, 112–13). Not a small part of these ideas have been framed with explicit reference to the ­concepts of coloniality and decoloniality. This chapter is an introduction to the exploration of the connections between Latin American and Caribbean colonial studies and scholarship on coloniality and the decolonial turn. Attention to the work of Aníbal Quijano and Sylvia Wynter offers an appreciation of the relevance of different major historical moments of the decolonial turn for the understanding of colonization and modernity. It also highlights the importance of avoiding a conflation between Latin America and the Caribbean, and between Latin American and Caribbean colonial studies. For both Quijano and Wynter, coloniality is less an object of study with discreet temporal and/or spatial boundaries than an organizing logic that is entangled with Western modernity. Attention to coloniality cannot dispense with a careful consideration of the historical periods of colonization in different parts of the world, including indigenous points of view that consider that colonization is ongoing. Coloniality, however, is present within and without colonial territories and settler colonial spaces that are considered republics or nation-states. Since the Caribbean and Latin America are the first areas of modern colonization in the so-called New World, colonial Caribbean and Latin American studies have much to offer in terms of understanding the constitution of modernity/coloniality.

Aníbal Quijano La colonialidad, en consecuencia, es aún el modo más general de dominación en el mundo actual, una vez que el colonialismo como orden político explícito fue destruido. Ella no agota, obviamente, las condiciones, ni las formas de explotación y de dominación

117

Nelson Maldonado-Torres

existentes entre las gentes. Las relaciones coloniales de periodos anteriores, probablemente no produjeron las mismas secuelas y sobre todo no fueron la piedra angular de ningún poder global. (Quijano 1991a, 14; trans. in Quijano 2010, 24) Aníbal Quijano (1928–2018) was one of the most renowned Latin American sociologists in the second half of the twentieth and the early part of the twenty-first century. Among other achievements, he was a major contributor to the theory of dependency (see, among others, Quijano1970a, 1970b). In the late 1980s and early 1990s he also coined the terms coloniality and coloniality of power, and started to develop theoretical accounts of these concepts that played a vital role in the generation of a decolonial turn in various fields of scholarship (Quijano 2010 [1991], 1993, 1994; Quijano and Wallerstein 1992). Quijano started his career as an expert on the work of the also Peruvian José Carlos Mariátegui (Quijano 1956), who is best known for his Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Mariátegui 2007 [1928]). Mariátegui’s Seven Interpretive Essays offer a creative Marxist approach to the conditions of Peru that considers the specific situation of Latin America, including its colonial history, and the role of race and ethnicity, in addition to class, in the formation of Peruvian society (Quijano 1995a). In doing this, Mariátegui arguably formulated a creolized version of Marxism that, with all its limitations, brought to light and challenged accounts of capitalism that used metropolitan European history as the norm. Not far from Mariátegui, Quijano’s early work also focused on seeking to understand the particularities of the Peruvian reality. His doctoral dissertation, “The emergence of the ‘cholo’ group and its implications for Peruvian society” (1965, my translation), explored what Quijano called the “cholificación” of the Peruvian population, the containment of “cholos” as a political force, and their potential. By “cholificación,” Quijano refers to a process of de-indianization of indigenous communities, many of which migrated to urban centers, particularly after 1945 (Quijano 2006, 19). Rita Segato refers to “cholificación” as a process of mestizaje from below, different from a mestizaje from the position of the sectors of the colonial society that claimed Spanish ancestry (2010, 2014). It is illuminating that one of the earliest literary references to the term “cholo” appears in the Comentarios reales de los incas (Royal commentaries of the Incas; Garcilaso 1991 [1609]) by the also Peruvian Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), back when what is known today as Peru was an administrative district of the Spanish Empire. Garcilaso went to Spain in his early twenties and lived there for most of his life (Varner 1968). In a chapter on “Nombres nuevos para nombrar diversas generaciones” [“New names to name diverse generations,” interestingly also translated elsewhere as “New names for various racial groups”] in the Comentarios, Garcilaso states that “cholo” is a term used to refer to the offspring of mulattas and mulattoes (see Vega 1991 [1609], book 9, chapter 31). At that time and in that context, Garcilaso explains that mulatta and mulatto were terms used to refer to the offspring of a Black man and an indigenous woman, or a Black woman and an indigenous man. Garcilaso’s Comentarios reales can be read as an anthropological treatise, “entre la épica y la historia” [between epic and history], as Mariátegui would put it, that seeks to shed light on Peruvian reality before, throughout, and right after the initial moments of conquest (Mariátegui 2007 [1928], 199). The information that Garcilaso offers about the emerging terms used to identify different people (criolla/os, mulattas/oes, cholas/os) combine reference to geography, labor positions, and gender instead of simply, or principally, religiosity. In doing so, it testifies to the emergence of new categories of identity and social position in a “New World” that includes Europe, Africa, the Americas, and the rest of the until then known world (Quijano 1991b, 1993).

118

Colonial studies and the decolonial turn

In this, one not only finds a displacement of theology as the preferred discourse to produce knowledge about the world, but also, an awareness of the necessarily inter-relational mode of analysis that is needed in order to make sense of the emerging globalized Western modernity (Maldonado-Torres 2014). As Sergio Villena Fiengo has suggested, one could argue that this form of analysis present in Garcilaso’s work not only anticipated, but also served as a source for Mariátegui’s and Quijano’s explorations of “Peruvian reality” (2016). The connection between the colonial figure of the Inca Garcilaso and both, Mariátegui and Quijano, also transpires in Mariátegui’s and Quijano’s work. Mariátegui characterizes Garcilaso as “the first Peruvian, if we understand ‘peruanity’ as a social formation, determined by the Spanish conquest and colonization” (Mariátegui 2007, 198, my translation). Quijano, in turn, considers Garcilaso as one of the principal “mestizos” who learned the “cultural codes of the victors” to transmit the idea of the “complex intersubjective universes” of the inhabitants of Peru before the conquest (1993, 171, my translation). For Quijano, knowledge of the richness and complexity of the indigenous world prior to the conquest represented a threat to the colonial order as it could serve as a major source of “cultural resistance over time” (1993, 171, my translation). Quijano identifies two main directions in “the defense of indigenous legacy” (Quijano 2007, 143, my translation) and traces one of them to Garcilaso’s Royal Commentaries. This modality of defense of indigenous heritage insists on “the peaceful, civilizing, and solidaric character of the Inca” (143, my translation). He differentiates this direction from another one that he traces to the also classic colonial text New Chronicle of Good Government by Guaman Poma de Ayala (c. 1535-c. 1615), which, according to him, is more critical than Garcilaso’s because it “insists on power and its implications” (143, my translation). For Quijano, both directions converge in contemporary calls for the restoration of “una sociedad tawantinsuyana” [a tawantinsuyan society] against “the increasingly predatory character of capital today” (143, my translation). Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to indicate that both directions (“vertientes”) that are present in Garcilaso’s Royal Commentaries and in Guaman Poma’s work can also be found in Quijano’s conceptualization of coloniality. Quijano approaches Garcilaso’s and Guaman Poma de Ayala’s work as different, yet related forms, of a decolonial turn against “cultural coloniality” (Quijano 2010 [1991], 23). By cultural coloniality Quijano means the relationship of domination between “Western” culture and all other cultures, but not only as an external relation between them. Cultural coloniality is a relationship that consists, “in the first place, of a colonization of the imagination of the dominated; that is, it acts in the interior of that imagination, in a sense, it is a part of it” (23; see also Gruzinski 1990).This interiorization of domination is the product of “[t]he repression, above all, over the modes of knowing, of producing knowledge, of producing perspectives, images and systems of images, symbols, modes of signification, over the resources, patterns, and instruments of formalized and objectivized expression, intellectual or visual” (23).There was also the imposition of the “rulers’ own patterns of expression” and of their “beliefs and images,” all of which served to facilitate “a very efficient means of social and cultural control, when the immediate repression ceased to be constant and systematic” (23). For Quijano, modern Western cultural coloniality started, not only with a systematic repression and subordination of non-European cultures, but also with “a massive and gigantic extermination of the natives” in the Americas (2010 [1991], 24). One of the key features of the global New World and of its mapping of subjects and geography is that it creates spaces for genocide. Cultural coloniality is anchored in this conceptualization, which is also a material relation, between the West and non-Western spaces.

119

Nelson Maldonado-Torres

Quijano’s attention to the demographic, cultural, and epistemic catastrophes that served as a foundation to the New World explains why he considered cultural resistance so important, including the work of the Inca Garcilaso and Guaman Poma de Ayala, as well as the culture of “cholas” and “cholos” in twentieth-century Peru.1 That is, cultural resistance in the colonies could not but take unique forms in the face of such catastrophes. The degree of devastation in the Americas, along with the “widespread importation of a labour force,” led Quijano to advance the thesis, in a joint publication with Immanuel Wallerstein, that “the mode of cultural resistance to oppressive conditions was less in the claims of historicity than in the flight forward to ‘modernity’” (Quijano and Wallerstein 1992, 549). That is, the catastrophic disconnection from the past by the decimation of the population, the importation and imposition of new systems of domination and exploitation, and the destruction and colonization of vast cultural spaces and knowledge formations in the New World, made it difficult to engage in cultural resistance by trying to assert a connection with the past. This would seem to indicate that assimilation to modernity was the only route of resistance for colonized subjects, yet much of Quijano’s work indicates that the most apt term and direction would be decoloniality.2 Quijano’s concepts of “coloniality” and “coloniality of power” are the outcome of his own decolonial turn within the social sciences, expressed as a form of epistemological decolonization that is in conversation with the multiple forms of cultural and social resistance to colonialism and its legacies in the modern world. In his 1991 essay, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” he referred to decolonization as “epistemic reconstitution,” which involves divesting—desprenderse, which appears as “to divest” in the translation, and that Mignolo interprets as “delinking,” which he connects to “epistemic disobedience”—from “the pitfalls of European rationality/modernity” (Quijano 2010 [1991], 30).3 The epistemic reconstitution introduced by the concepts of coloniality and coloniality of power involves a questioning of the standard approach to the spatial and temporal boundaries of colonialism and decolonization. For Quijano, coloniality survives explicit forms of colonialism, and is part of a global matrix of power that emerged or that at least started to acquire centrality with the “discovery” of the New World. While similar perspectives have been advanced before, Quijano greatly benefited from one of the most pressing social and intellectual debates that were taking place when he formulated the concept of coloniality: the debate around the meaning and significance of the 500th anniversary of the “discovery” of the Americas. This historical context has been characterized as a major moment in the genealogy of the decolonial turn (Maldonado-Torres 2017b). In addition to the debate about the 500 years after the “discovery,” the late 1980s and early 1990s presented a challenge to leftist intellectuals everywhere, including in Latin America. Whether justified or not at that time, Marxism was in crisis because of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union in 1989. It was the end of a crucial part of the Cold War—which continued in other places such as the Korean Peninsula (We 2019). Marxists like Quijano, who had been critical of key ideas in the standard Marxism of the time, particularly the concept of totality, of economic reductionism, and of the absolute centrality of class in the analysis of capitalism and the opposition to it, found themselves in an arena that invited them to carefully and seriously consider the question of the significance of “discovery” and colonialism.4 This explains the tone and the substance of Quijano’s essay “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” which starts with specific reference to “the conquest of the societies and the cultures which inhabit what today is called Latin America” (Quijano 2010 [1991], 22). Quijano also makes a connection between conquest and “the constitution of a new world order” that culminates “five hundred years later, in a global power covering the whole planet” (22). “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality” originally appeared as the opening article in a special issue largely dedicated to reflections about the “discovery” of the Americas and which 120

Colonial studies and the decolonial turn

included a section entitled “Voz indígena” [Indigenous voice] with several statements and reports from indigenous organizations about the “discovery” (see Quijano 1991a). The article was then reproduced in a 1992 publication entitled Los conquistados: 1492 y la población indígena de las Américas [The conquered: 1492 and the indigenous population in the Americas; Bonilla 1992a].5 It was in this edited collection that Walter Mignolo, who is widely known for his writings on Latin American colonial studies and for his explorations of decolonial thinking, encountered Quijano’s essay for the first time. He has characterized reading Quijano’s article as “a sort of epiphany” (2009, 39).6 While Quijano does not use the concept of “coloniality of power” explicitly in his 1991 essay, he does refer to coloniality in that essay as “the most general form of domination in the world today” (2010 [1991], 24).7 Then, in a 1993 publication that is based on a presentation that he offered at an international conference that took place in October of 1992 and that was dedicated to Mariátegui, Europe, and “el otro aspecto del descubrimiento” [the other aspect of the discovery], he explicitly refers to the “colonialidad del actual poder global” [the coloniality of the current global power] (1993, 167). He also starts the essay with reference to the linkages between capitalism, the division of labor, and the production of “new identities,” like “Indian,” “Black,” “white,” and “mestizo,” all of which became part of his more formal definition of the coloniality of power. The epistemic reconstitution at work in the idea of the coloniality of power involves the connection between political economical structures, culture, and knowledge production, as well as between exploitation and domination, as it is explained in the 1997 essay “Coloniality of Power, Culture, and Knowledge in Latin America” (Quijano 2000 [1997]). In this essay, Quijano writes that “America was constituted as the first space/time of a new model of power of global vocation, and both in this way and by it became the first identity of modernity” (533). He explains that the new model of global power has “two fundamental axes”: (a) the idea of ‘race,’ which served as the basis to classify populations within the new model of power, and (b) capitalism, as a structure for the control of labor, its resources, and products that articulated “all historically known previous structures of control of labor…together around and upon the basis of capital and the world market” (533–34). For Quijano, state hierarchies, social classification, and domination based on the idea of race are entangled with capitalist exploitation. All of them came together and became a central part of an emerging world system in the time of discovery, conquest, and colonialism. The coloniality of power refers mainly to this entanglement, which affects the central areas of modern existence: the forms of authority (e.g., the state), labor, sex (through the bourgeois family and exclusions from it), and intersubjectivity/knowledge (e.g., Eurocentrism). By becoming a central part of Western modernity, which it helps to generate, the coloniality of power does not depend on formal or explicit juridico-political relations of colonial domination. The coloniality of power is, therefore, not only a theory of modern Western colonialism, but also a theory of modernity. It is a theory or analytical framework that reflected critiques of existing paradigms and formulas, such as Marxism, neoliberal globalization, and postmodernism, and that sought to take seriously the calls for attention to the 500 years of modern Western colonization in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It also built on multiple theoretical formations that insisted on the constant presence of colonial relations after the formation of republics and/or on the entanglement between capitalism and race.8 While race and capitalism appear at the center of Quijano’s formulation of the coloniality of power in the above-mentioned essay of 1997, with other forms of domination organized around them, he offers a perhaps more radical conceptualization of the term in a footnote of a 1994 publication entitled “Colonialidad del poder y democracia” [Coloniality of power and 121

Nelson Maldonado-Torres

democracy]. In this text, Quijano rejects the conflation of coloniality of power and ethnicity/ race, claiming that: Coloniality of power is, to be sure, a category that is more complex than that of racism/ethnicity. It includes, normally, the “señorialismo” between the dominant and the dominated; sexism and patriarchalism; “familismo,” clientelism, “compadrazgo” and patrimonialism in the relationships between the public and the private, and above all between civil society and the political institutions. And articulating and bringing all of that together, authoritarianism in society and the state. The complex racism/ethnicity form part of the foundation of this power. (1994, 94)9 Quijano anticipates here the proliferation of approaches to coloniality, which today include a myriad of explorations, including the coloniality of knowledge (Lander 2000; Mignolo 2000; Grosfoguel and Cervantes-Rodríguez 2002; Walsh, Schiwy, and Castro-Gómez, 2002; CastroGómez and Grosfoguel 2007), the coloniality of gender (Lugones 2007, 2010a, 2010b; Espinosa Miñoso, Gómez Correal, and Ochoa Muñoz 2014), and the coloniality of being (Mignolo 2003; Wynter 2003; Maldonado-Torres 2007), among others. What is common to these various theoretical approaches and forms of analysis is a connection between colonial history, a colonial logic embedded in knowledges, cultures, and institutions, and the recognition of multiple forms of resistance. Quijano insisted on the importance of epistemic decolonization because he thought that the dominant theoretical frameworks in the social sciences were inhibiting a proper identification and understanding of the major problems and possibilities that deserved to be considered in Latin America. In this context, he points to figures such as the Inca Garcilaso and Guaman Poma de Ayala as representatives of major forms of cultural resistance that continue having relevance after the formal end of colonialism and the attainment of independence from Spain. He also paid attention to at least some twentieth-century intellectuals and movements that contributed to this perspective. Most of these were present in Latin America. I will now turn to Sylvia Wynter to identify a parallel trajectory of engagement with colonial studies and with the decolonial turn that is focused on the Caribbean and the question of Blackness.

Sylvia Wynter The Call 1492. The Great Discoverers hurl themselves upon the Atlantic, in search of the Indies. With them begins the poem. Also all those, before and after this New Day, who have known their dream, lived off it or died from it. The imagination suscitates ever new Indies, for which man quarrels with the world… Edouard Glissant, Les indes (1956)10 Like Quijano, Sylvia Wynter was born in 1928. Her parents gave birth to her in Cuba and raised her in Jamaica (Scott 2000), which means that right from the start of her life she was exposed to two different histories of colonization and struggles for decolonization. On the one hand, there was the Spanish Empire and the history of the struggle for independence in what came to be known as Latin America, and, on the other, there was the British Empire and its presence in the Caribbean all through the second part of the twentieth century. Jamaica became independent in 1962, which means that Wynter was a colonial subject raised in a colonial context. As a Black 122

Colonial studies and the decolonial turn

Caribbean subject in a majority Black colony, Wynter also had to contend directly with a long legacy of anti-Black racism which could be considered foundational for the Caribbean and the Americas. The relationship between colonialism, modernity, the birth of the Americas and the impact of multiple empires in the region, and anti-Blackness is central in her work. Wynter’s work on colonialism and her contribution to the understanding of coloniality and decoloniality are surely not limited to her lived experience as a Black Caribbean colonial subject with roots in Cuba and Jamaica. In 1947, Wynter left Jamaica to study modern languages at King’s College, London. Her specialization was Spanish with a minor in English (Scott 2000, 126). The teacher who advised her to pursue this path was a specialist in sixteenth and seventeenth century Spanish literature (127), and Wynter herself completed a Master’s degree on Golden Age Spanish Drama in 1953. Wynter thus became very well versed on the period of the formation and expansion of the Spanish empire in the Americas. Wynter was not a traditional scholar of the Spanish Golden Age, though. Her approach to the Golden Age as well as to drama was informed by the emerging anticolonial movements in Jamaica and the diaspora from at least the 1940s. In Jamaica, she was part of a generation of students who were greatly impacted by the anticolonial Jamaica Youth Movement (Scott 2000, 126). While in London, Wynter met other young people from the West Indies, Africa, and India, all of whom shared an anticolonial sensibility, leading to what Wynter describes as a sense of “Third Worldness.” What we have then is that, in the 1940s and early 1950s, both Quijano and Wynter find clear indications of the unfinished business of colonization as well as new efforts or new possibilities to engage colonization critically and creatively. For Quijano, it was the “cholificación” of indigenous communities in urban spaces of Peru. While Peru was an independent nation-state, the sociological dimensions of indigenous peoples who lived in urban spaces (but not only there) was indicative of a constant presence of colonial features in Peruvian society. Quijano was not an expert in colonial studies or a colonial subject. He was in touch with colonial reality in another way. It was as a sociologist who observed the social dynamics around “cholas” and “cholos” that he became obsessed, if you will, with the question of the legacies of colonization and cultural resistance. Already in Latin America, there was an investment in the idea of development, particularly after the end of the Second World War. Developmentalism made the colonial period appear further in the past than it actually was. In the eyes of many, development represented the last stroke against indigenous reality in Latin America. At least in Quijano’s approach, “cholificación” represented a challenge to the developmentalist ideal and to the search for solutions to the problems created by colonization only within Western modernity. It was different for Wynter, yet there are common threads. Wynter was closer than Quijano to specializing in colonial studies and she was a colonial subject herself. The colonial condition of Jamaica at the time should not be underestimated. As Wynter points out: up to then we had been a totally governed and administered people.You cannot imagine how total a system colonialism was! I still remember the image of the British governor’s plumed helmet, his white suit, his military entourage, the flag of the British Empire and so on. The whole ceremonial panoply of it! How could it even have occurred to you then, before the struggles erupted, that you as a ‘native’ subject could take action on your own? (Scott 2000, 125) Wynter did not have to read Mariátegui or any particular figures to be persuaded about the continued relevance of colonialism because Jamaica was still a colony.While Spanish colonialism in the Americas concluded in around 1898, the British Empire persisted well into the 123

Nelson Maldonado-Torres

twentieth century. Also, while the Spaniards settled in the Americas and mixed in various ways with the local populations, thereby creating a large creole and mestizo population, the British tended to govern from a distance and their colonies in the Caribbean had a majority Black population most of whom were originally introduced as slaves. As a result, the critical engagements with British dominion in Jamaica could not avoid addressing colonialism, racial slavery, and anti-Blackness, which mestizo Latin Americans could seek to evade more easily. The 1940s and the early 1950s have been conceptualized as a key part of a massively influential moment of the decolonial turn (Maldonado-Torres 2017a), and in that sense it is not surprising to find that Quijano’s and Wynter’s own intellectual decolonial turns seem to have taken place in that context.Those were the moments when a second wave of anticolonial movements were emerging and when both these movements and the tragedies of the Second World War led to an intensification of skepticism about the promises of European civilization. The increasing anticolonial sensibility and the skepticism had already started. For example, C.L.R. James published his Black Jacobins in 1938, and Aimé Césaire his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal in 1939. Both of them wrote these texts as colonial subjects in a colonial context, which makes them primary sources in Caribbean colonial studies. The critique of colonialism quickly intensified, which become obvious in Césaire’s Discourse sur le colonialisme (1952) and Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and Wretched of the Earth (1962), which concludes with a call to abandon Europe and avoid the reproduction of colonial structures, knowledges, hierarchies, and values after independence. Born in the 1960s, the Latin American sociology of dependency of which Quijano was part also warned about the problems with the reproduction of European ideas of development and, in some cases, of internal forms of colonialism in Latin American states (e.g., González Casanova 1970 [1963], Stavenhagen 1970 [1965]). Intellectuals in the West Indies were also contributing to the critical reflection on the social, political, economic, and cultural models that the colonies had inherited from the European empires, as they were also trying to find a path forward. For the West Indians, this was a particularly urgent manner as most of the territories could become independent, for the first time, within a matter of a few years. Also, many of the territories would be constituted by a majority of Black citizens, which means that they had to tackle anti-Black racism frontally from the start. In the 1960s, perhaps the most important West Indian intellectual movement that engaged in a critique of colonialism and in an exploration of alternative ways of organizing society, conceiving of knowledge, culture, etc., was the New World Group. The work of the New World Group, and its journal, the New World Quarterly, was rooted in the anticolonial sentiment that Wynter found in Jamaica and London back in the 1940s and 1950s (Walmsley 1992, 195). While Wynter was not part of the New World Group like Quijano was part of the dependency theorists or Elsa Goveia was part of the New World Group itself, she had at least two publications in the New World Quarterly and considered herself part of the general movement around it (Scott 2000, 146).Very important to understand Wynter’s engagement with colonialism is one idea that was central to the New World Group and that Wynter found greatly valuable: the conceptualization of the plantation as the “starting point of the modern world and developing a new scholarship based on that…” (Scott 2000, 146). As a student of language more than a historian herself, Wynter conceives the search for the cognitive perspective that facilitates this new scholarship as “a new science of the Word” (Wynter 2001).Wynter takes this term from Césaire’s work, but she interprets it in light of her view of Fanon’s conception of sociogeny, or the mutual imbrication of social formations, culture, and the lived experience of human beings. A science of the Word is a study of the master codes and rules, also understood by Wynter as the sociogenic principle, that accounts for the production and reproduction of modes of being 124

Colonial studies and the decolonial turn

human. How all of this is relevant to colonial studies is that both Césaire’s and Fanon’s work were meditations on and from the colonial experience. Like Wynter, they were not taking the colonized or the colonial period simply as objects of study, but as a zone for the generation of questions that could lead to the decolonization of established knowledge and the production of new ideas with universal import. Thus, Wynter’s exploration of colonial history and literature is driven by the effort to contribute to or generate a new philosophy of history (Wilson Harris and Goveia; see Chamberlain 2004), a new science of the Word (Césaire and Wynter), and a new conception of humanity (Fanon). Wynter thus produces a creative synthesis between literary theory, semiotics, Fanonian sociogenesis, and the philosophy of history, among other areas, in the interest of responding to the question, “What is the human?,” and how to escape the power of what W. E. B. Du Bois (1969) referred to as the color line. Like members of the New World Group and other Caribbean intellectuals at the time, but probably even more so, Wynter’s work has focused on theorizing the connections between the formation of the Caribbean, the New World, and Western modernity.What is at stake here is the emergence of a new unit of analysis, the post-1492 Caribbean as a foundational component of the modern West.This unit of analysis challenges the usual divides between Europe and its colonies, as it also challenges temporal divides between the juridico-political colonial period and the modern/colonial age at large.This means that formal independence does not, by itself, represent a break with the modern/colonial order and, therefore, cannot be taken as the definitive marker for new forms of politics, a new society, or a new form of knowledge.This perspective also challenges the academic division between colonial and non-colonial studies, and between area study approaches, which focus on different regions of the world. It is not that these temporal and spatial markers cannot be helpful at times, but that they should not be allowed to take the place of a new philosophy of history that challenges the separation between Europe and non-Europe, and between the colony, the metropolis, and the “post”-colonies. This explains why a great part of Wynter’s work explores the sixteenth century “colonial” period (in her essays on Bernardo de Balbuena, Bartolomé de las Casas, and Christopher Columbus, for example) and another part explores twentieth-century Caribbean literary and historical work (in her engagement with Lamming, Césaire, Fanon, Glissant, and others). These are for her different key moments in the making and challenging of the post-1492 Caribbean order. Wynter observes a significant challenge to the post-1492 episteme in Caribbean writing in a range of contributions that go from the formation of negritude in the 1930s up to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth published in 1962 and beyond. She also considered the US Civil Rights movement and the power movements, especially figures such as Malcolm X, part of the same decolonial insurgency. The formation of Black studies and other ethnic studies areas in the US represented for her a major moment in the struggle for the decolonization of knowledge within the Western university.Wynter knew about Black studies and related areas from the inside, as she became the director of the Program in African and African American Studies at Stanford University, founded in 1969, shortly after she arrived in the US in the mid-1970s. Her work on Black studies is consistent with her “philosophy of history,” and it engages in a critique of a strong divide between colonial studies and ethnic studies. Rather than “studies,” the “colonial” and the “ethnic” appear in her work as grounds for thinking critically about the making of modern “studies,” anchored in the modern Western liberal arts and sciences and the modern world. Perhaps the first synthesis of Wynter’s view on the European Renaissance and the significance of the “discovery” of the Americas and colonialism for the formation of Western modernity, along with her interpretation of the formation of the new “ethnic,” “gender,” and/or “minority studies” of the 1960s and 1970s appears in the much celebrated essay “The Ceremony 125

Nelson Maldonado-Torres

Must be Found: After Humanism” of 1984 (Wynter 1984). This essay responds to a crisis of the humanities in the early 1980s. To adequately respond to this crisis, Wynter goes back to the formation of humanistic studies during the European Renaissance.Wynter argues that the imbrication of the European Renaissance and the “discovery” and colonization of the Americas led to the creation of a new dichotomy between Reason and Lack of Reason. Within this scheme, Europeans and European civilization came to occupy the position of Reason, and “natives” from colonial territories and “negroes” came to represent the most absolute Lack of Reason. This framework allows Wynter to offer an interpretation of the “new studies” of the 1960s and 1970s (ethnic, women, and/or minority studies) as major contributions to address the deeper crisis in place: the crisis, or rather catastrophe, one could argue, of the continued reproduction of the post-1492 order of knowledge and its global implications. Wynter’s creative synthesis of her ideas about the Renaissance, colonialism, and anti-colonial knowledges anticipated a larger trend of similar reflections that emerged in the 1990s and that have been known as the Latin American modernity/coloniality research group (Escobar 2010). Wynter’s own early conceptualization of decolonial thinking combined expert knowledges of the Spanish Golden Age and Spanish colonialism, British colonialism, and anti-colonial responses to both. Her being part of a generation of Afro-Caribbean anticolonial intellectuals faced with the imminent possibility of independence in majority Black nations shaped her work and made it relevant to decolonization. All of this considered, it can be argued that Wynter was better equipped than Quijano to explore the theoretical significance of the post-1492 context, and that she engaged in this activity before Quijano as well. Without using the categories of coloniality or coloniality of power, Wynter put together a framework that provided an account of the inherently colonial dimension of power, knowledge, and being within modernity. She also offered a conceptualization of the decolonization of knowledge and of the relevance of  “ethnic,” “women,” and/or “minority” studies for this task. In this, she paved the way for others who have made explicit the relevance of Black studies and “ethnic” studies areas for decolonial thought.This is why in 2003, it was not difficult for Wynter (2003) to rehearse and further refine her analytical framework with explicit reference to “coloniality” in dialogue with Quijano’s and Mignolo’s work. By the time that Wynter engaged the emerging literature on coloniality and used the concept of the “coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom” in 2003 (Wynter 2003), she had already greatly developed the argument about the relevance of 1492 for the founding of the Western idea of Man. The occasion for Wynter’s systematic exploration of this idea represented another major moment of the decolonial turn as well as for Latin American colonial studies, one that was also crucial for Quijano: the 500th year anniversary of the “discovery” of the Americas. Like many other intellectuals at the time, Wynter started to consider, or in her case, deepen, the question about the meaning and significance of the “discovery” of the Americas at least a few years before 1992. She was doing so already in 1989, in an essay that concluded with an engagement with Edouard Glissant’s contribution to the understanding of the relevance of Columbus’ “discovery” in his epic poem of 1955, Les indes (Wynter 1989).11 By that time, Wynter had already developed a sophisticated framework of her own to engage the question of the meaning and significance of the “discovery,” and, as 1992 approached, she counted with a growing amount of literature by historians, anthropologists, literary scholars and others who started to focus on the theme. As we have seen, one such intellectual who was also contributing to these themes at the time was Aníbal Quijano. Published in 1991, both Wynter’s “Columbus and the Poetics of the Propter Nos” (1991) and Quijano’s “Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad” (1991a) appeared in journals alongside other materials that addressed the 500th anniversary of the “discovery” of the Americas. That Quijano, like Wynter, had already been thinking and writing about the relevance of the 126

Colonial studies and the decolonial turn

“discovery” for the constitution of Western modernity is clear in writings such as “Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in America Latina” (Quijano 1995 [1988]), originally published in Spanish in 1988, and the interview entitled “La modernidad, el capital, y América Latina nacen el mismo día” [“Modernity, Capital, and Latin America were Born on the Same Day”] (Quijano 1991b). The shared premise in Wynter’s and Quijano’s work was that the Caribbean and Latin America were not late and passive recipients of “modernization,” but that the “discovery” and colonialism of the Americas were constitutive elements of W   estern modernity, and, as such, that they were part of modernity from the outset. In the Americas, one could find both the formation of discourses, practices, and institutions that would gradually become global, and multiple modalities of “cultural resistance,” to use Quijano’s term, that remain relevant in the contemporary world. As such, the Caribbean and Latin America are both modern, but also more than just modern. Wynter’s and Quijano’s approach to modernity would turn modernization theory and at least some forms of colonial studies on their head. Their work proposes that modernization is not something to struggle for after colonization. Rather, modernization has always already been colonial. As a result, the main task for Caribbean and Latin American territories is not to modernize, but to decolonize, which is different from obtaining independence. A decolonial turn in Caribbean and Latin American Studies, such as the one that is found in Quijano’s and Wynter’s work, also leads us to consider the colonial periods in the Caribbean and Latin America as intense laboratories where various forms of coloniality are produced. They are exported to other colonial territories and become part of modern forms of governmentability. A decolonial turn in Latin American and Caribbean studies thus calls for the development of theoretical approaches that consider colonialism in relation to modernity/coloniality. Also important is relational work between the different forms of colonialism in the Caribbean and in Latin America, as well as between multiple sites of colonialism, including Africa, the Pacific, and South Asia, among others. The forms of insurgency during the colonial period also acquire a deep significance for the present, as they can provide valuable resources for the engagement against coloniality. Modernity/coloniality is global, yet it has not been able to capture or subdue every aspect of human organization or experience. A decolonial turn in colonial studies can also help identify the extent and limits of colonial power, and open up more spaces to consider counter-catastrophic knowledges, histories, symbols and actions in the effort to create a different and better world.

Notes 1 For an elaboration of the concept of catastrophe in relation to coloniality and the decolonial turn, see Maldonado-Torres (2016, 2017b). 2 In “Modernity and Coloniality/Rationality,” Quijano states that “The alternative, then, is clear: the destruction of the coloniality of world power. First of all, epistemological decolonization, as decoloniality, is needed to clear the way for new intercultural communication, for an interchange of experiences and meanings, as the basis of another rationality which may legitimately pretend to some universality” (Quijano 2010 [1991], 31). Note that while the concept of “epistemological decolonization” appears in the original 1991 publication, the term “decoloniality” is added in the English translation that was originally published in 2007 and republished in 2010. This is an indication that Quijano became increasingly engaged with and identified with the discourse on decoloniality, which he formulated in Spanish as “des/colonialidad” and that he used in multiple occasions, up to his last publications (see, for example, 2014a, 2014b). 3 Mignolo often translates Quijano’s concept of desprendimiento as “delinking,” a concept that has become central in his work (López-Calvo 2016, 176; Mignolo 2010, 2018, 20; Mignolo and Walsh 2018, 246). Building on Quijano’s lead, Mignolo approaches authors of the colonial period such as Guaman Poma de Ayala as examples of decolonial cultural resistance and epistemic disobedience, which he interprets as delinking (2006, 26; 2010, 315).

127

Nelson Maldonado-Torres 4 In the late 1980s, Quijano criticizes Sovietism and neoliberal globalization in the context of his search for a fresh interpretation of the relationship between modernity and Latin America. See for example his “Paradoxes of Modernity in Latin America,” which concludes with the statement that “Statism and capitalist privatism are actually nothing other than the Scylla and Charybdis of the navigators of our present history. We neither have to choose between them or fear them. The ship of the new liberationist rationality sails today with a new hope” (Quijano 1989, 176). That there was a certain entanglement at the time between the fall of the Soviet Union, which happened in 1989, and the anniversary of the 500th year of “discovery” of the New World is directly evinced in the publication Después de la caída: el significado de la crisis del socialismo para América Latina y Europa del Este [After the fall: the significance of the crisis of socialism for America Latin and Eastern Europe; see Bonilla 1992b], which is a collection of a series of presentations that took place within the space of another event entitled “1492 y la población indígena de las Américas” of January 27–30, 1992. Aníbal Quijano was one of the speakers at these events. The publication entitled Después de la caída, includes Quijanos’s reflections about the crisis of socialism. His reflections about 1492, discovery, and colonialism at the time appear in a different collection of essays entitled Los conquistados: 1492 y la población indígena de las Américas [The conquered: 1492 and the indigenous population of the Americas; see Bonilla 1992a].That is, the same event culminated in two edited collections: one dedicated to the crisis of socialism and the implications of the fall of the Soviet Block for Eastern Europe and Latin America, and the other to the 500th year anniversary. Both topics were being engaged at the same time. Quijano’s contribution to the edited book Los conquistados (Bonilla 1992a) was none other than his influential essay “Modernity and Coloniality/Rationality.” This article is also featured (with some additions) as the opening chapter in the 2010 edited book Globalization and the Decolonial Option (Mignolo and Escobar 2010), which has become a common reference in the scholarship that addressed coloniality and decoloniality in the last decade. Quijano also participated in the “Rencontre Internationale José Carlos Mariátegui et l’Europe: L’autre aspect de la decouverte” [International meeting Jose Carlos Mariátegui and Europe: the other aspect of discovery] which took place at the Université de Pau et des Pays de L’Adour in France in October 1992. 5 See previous note for more information about the relevance of the time and publications where “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality” appeared. 6 Mignolo gives an idea of the reasons why Quijano’s concept of coloniality appeared as an epiphany to him in his discussion of Quijano’s work in relation to other theorists such as Angel Rama, Antonio Cornejo Polar, and Nestor García Canclini in Mignolo (2008). 7 Note that the version of “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality” that appears in a 2007 special issue of the journal Cultural Studies, later reproduced in the edited book Globalization and the Decolonial Option (Mignolo and Escobar 2010), includes a short section entitled “‘Race’ and the coloniality of power” that does not appear in the original essay of 1991(Quijano 1991a) or in its reproduction in the anthology of 1992 (Quijano 1992). 8 Unfortunately, key essays such as Quijano’s “Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad” [Coloniality and modernity/rationality] and Quijano’s and Wallerstein’s “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World System,” do not include notes or references, which makes it difficult to trace the intellectual sources and specific social movements that may have played a role in Quijano’s conceptualization of coloniality.This is not altogether unusual at the time in Latin America. However, Grosfoguel (2018) argues that Quijano reproduced a form of epistemic racism by not citing Black Marxists in the Caribbean and the US, among others.This does not mean that Grosfoguel claims that there is no originality or substance in Quijano’s work. One can also argue that there are traces of Quijano’s position early on in his writings on dependency (see, for example, 1970b), and that his more developed account of the coloniality of power transcends the point about the imbrication of capitalism and race. This matter remains in the agenda for further research and discussion on Quijano and the coloniality of power. 9 This is my translation to English of a passage that is available in French and that can be read here: http://www.multitudes.net/Colonialite-du-pouvoir-et/ 10 This is Jefferson Humphries’s translation, as it appears in Glissant (1997, 166). 11 See Wynter (1989), “Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles,” where she makes explicit reference to the “five hundred years since Columbus sailed across an ocean sea that was logically nonnavigable within the a priori conceptual schema and mainstream mode of ‘conventional reason’ of the feudal-Christian episteme” (644).

128

Colonial studies and the decolonial turn

Works cited Bonilla, Heraclio, ed. 1992a. Los conquistados: 1492 y la población indígena de las Américas. Quito, EC: Tercer Mundo Editores, FLACSO, and Ediciones Libri Mundi. ———. 1992b. Después de la caída: el significado de la crisis del socialismo para América Latina y Europa del Este. Quito: Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales. Castro-Gómez, Santiago, and Ramón Grosfoguel, eds. 2007. El giro decolonial: reflexiones para una diversidad epistémica más allá del capitalismo global. Bogotá, CO: Universidad Javeriana y Siglo del Hombre Editores. Chamberlain, Mary. 2004. “Elsa Goveia: History and Nation.” History Workshop Journal 58 (1): 167–190. Du Bois, W.E.B. 1969. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: The New American Library. Escobar, Arturo. 2010. “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise: The Latin American Modernity/Coloniality Research Program.” In Globalization and the Decolonial Option, edited by Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar, 33–64. London: Routledge. Espinosa Miñoso, Yuderkys, Diana Gómez Correal, and Karina Ochoa Muñoz, eds. 2014. Tejiendo de otro modo: feminismo, epistemología y apuestas decoloniales en Abya Yala. Popayan, CO: Editorial Universidad del Cauca. Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca. [1609] 1991. Comentarios reales de los incas. Vol. 1. Lima: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Glissant, Edouard. 1956. Les indes: poème de l’une et l’autre terre. Paris: Falaize. ———. 1997. “A Field of Islands.” Translated by Jefferson Humphries. In Poetics of the Americas: Race, Founding, and Textuality, edited by Bainard Cowan and Jefferson Humphries, 165–180. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. González Casanova, Pablo. [1963] 1970. “Sociedad plural, colonialismo interno y desarrollo.” In América Latina: ensayos de interpretación sociológica-política, edited by Fernando H. Cardoso and F.Weffort, 164–183. Santiago, CH: Editorial Universitaria. Grosfoguel, Ramón. 2018. “Negros marxistas o marxismos negros? Una mirada descolonial.” Tabula Rasa 28: 11–22. Grosfoguel, Ramón, and Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodríguez, eds. 2002. The Modern/Colonial/Capitalist World-System in the Twentieth Century: Global Processes, Antisystemic Movements, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Gruzinski, Serge. 1990. La guerre des images: de Christophe Colomb à “Blade Runner” (1492–2019). Paris: Fayard. Lander, Edgardo, ed. 2000. La colonialidad del saber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales: perspectivas latinoamericanas. Caracas,VE: Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Sociales (FACES-UCV); Instituto Internacional de la UNESCO para la Educación Superior en América Latina y el Caribe (IESALC). López-Calvo, Ignacio. 2016. “Coloniality is not over, it is all over:” Interview with Dr. Walter Mignolo (Nov. 2014. Part I). TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 6 (1): 175–184. Lugones, María. 2007. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22 (1): 186–209. ———. 2010a. “The Coloniality of Gender.” In Globalization and the Decolonial Option, edited by Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar, 369–390. London: Routledge. ———. 2010b. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25 (4):742–759. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2007. “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept.” Cultural Studies 21 (2–3): 240–270. ———. 2014. “Religion, Conquest, and Race in the Foundations of the Modern/Colonial World.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82 (3): 636–665. ———. 2016. “Outline of Ten Theses on Coloniality and Decoloniality.” Frantz Fanon Foundation. Last modified October 2016, accessed April 5, 2019. http://fondation-frantzfanon.com/ outline-of-ten-theses-on-coloniality-and-decoloniality/. ———. 2017a. “On Metaphysical Catastrophe, Post-continental Thought, and the Decolonial Turn.” In Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, edited by Tatiana Flores and Michelle A. Stephens, 247–259. Los Angeles: Museum of Latin American Art. ———. 2017b. “The Decolonial Turn.” In New Approaches to Latin American Studies: Culture and Power, edited by Juan Poblete, 111–127. London: Routledge.

129

Nelson Maldonado-Torres Mariátegui, José Carlos. [1928] 2007. 7 ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana. 3rd ed. Caracas: Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho. Mignolo,Walter D. 2000. Global Histories, Local Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ——— 2003. “Os esplendores e as misérias da ‘ciência’: colonialidade, geopolítica do conhecimento e pluri-versalidade epistémica.” In Conhecimento Prudente para uma Vida Decente: Um Discurso sobre as Ciências’ revistado, edited by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 667–709. Porto, PT: Edições Afrontamento. ——— 2006. “De-linking: Don Quixote, Globalization and the Colonies.” Macalester International 17: 3–35. ——— 2008. “Preamble: The Historical Foundation of Modernity/Coloniality and the Emergence of Decolonial Thinking.” In A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture, edited by Sara CastroKlaren, 12–32. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. ——— 2009.“Coloniality:The Darker Side of Modernity.” In Modernologies: Contemporary Artists Researching Modernity and Modernism, edited by Sabine Breitwieser, 39–49. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani. ——— 2010. “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of De-coloniality.” In Globalization and the Decolonial Option, edited by Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar, 303–368. London: Routledge. ——— 2018. “Reconstitución epistémica/estética: la aesthesis decolonial una década después.” Calle 14. Revista de investigación en el campo del arte 14 (25):14–32. Mignolo,Walter D., and Arturo Escobar, eds. 2010. Globalization and the Decolonial Option. London: Routledge. Mignolo,Walter D., and Catherine E.Walsh. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Quijano, Aníbal, ed. 1956. Ensayos escogidos de José Carlos Mariátegui. Lima: Primer Festival del Libro Peruano. Quijano, Aníbal. 1965. “La emergencia del grupo cholo y sus implicaciones en la sociedad peruana.” PhD diss, Sociology, Universidad Nacional de San Marcos. ———. 1970a. “Dependencia, cambio social y urbanización en América Latina.” In América Latina: Ensayos de interpretación sociológico-política, edited by Fernando H. Cardoso and Francisco Weffort, 96–140. Santiago, CH: Editorial Universitaria. ———. 1970b. Redefinición de la dependencia y proceso de marginalización en América Latina. Santiago, CH: División de Asuntos Sociales, CEPAL. ———. 1989. “Paradoxes of Modernity in Latin America.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 3 (2): 147–177. ———. 1991a. “Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad.” Perú Indígena 13 (29): 11–20. ———. 1991b. “La modernidad, el capital, y América Latina nacen el mismo día.” ILLA-Revista del Centro de Educación y Cultura 10: 42–57. ———. 1992. “Colonialidad y modernidad-racionalidad.” In Los conquistados: 1492 y la población indígena de las Américas, edited by Heraclio Bonilla, 437–447. Quito: Tercer Mundo Editores, FLACSO, and Ediciones Libri Mundi. ———. 1993. “‘Raza,’ ‘etnia,’ y ‘nación’: cuestiones abiertas.” In José Carlos Mariátegui y Europa: el otro aspecto del descubrimiento, edited by Roland Forgues, 167–187. Lima: Amauta. ———. 1994. “Colonialité du pouvoir et démocratie en Amérique Latine.” In Amérique Latine, démocratie et exclusion, translated by James Cohen and edited by Paul Cammack, Alejandro Álvarez Béjar, and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, 93–100. Paris: L’Harmattan. ———. 1995a. “El marxismo en Mariátegui: una propuesta de racionalidad alternativa.” In El marxismo de José Carlos Mariátegui, edited by David Sobrevilla Alcázar, 39–48. Lima: Universidad de Lima; Empresa Editora Amauta S.A. ———. [1988] 1995b. “Modernity, Identity, and Utopia in Latin America.” In The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America, edited by John Beverly, Michael Arona and José Oviedo, 201–216. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. [1997] 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Translated by Michael Ennis. Nepantla:Views from South 1 (3): 533–580. ———. 2006. “Estado-nación y ‘movimientos indígenas’ en la región Andina: cuestiones abiertas.” Observatorio Social de América Latina 6 (19): 15–24. ———. 2007. “Don Quijote y los molinos de viento en América Latina.” In De la teoría crítica a una crítica plural de la modernidad, edited by Oliver Kozlarek, 123–146. Buenos Aires: Editorial Biblos. ———. [1991] 2010. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality.” In Globalization and the Decolonial Option, edited by Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar, 22–32. London: Routledge.

130

Colonial studies and the decolonial turn ———. 2014a. “‘Bien vivir’: entre el ‘desarrollo’ y la des/colonialidad del poder.” In Des/colonialidad y bien vivir: un nuevo debate en América Latina, edited by Aníbal Quijano, 19–34. Lima: Universidad Ricardo Palma, Editorial Universitaria, Cátedra América Latina y la Colonialidad del Poder. ———, ed. 2014b. Des/colonialidad y bien vivir: un nuevo debate en América Latina. Lima, PE: Universidad Ricardo Palma, Editorial Universitaria, Cátedra América Latina y la Colonialidad del Poder. Quijano, Aníbal, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1992. “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System.” International Social Science Journal 44 (134): 549–557. Scott, David. 2000. “The Re-enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wynter.” Small Axe 8: 119–207. Segato, Rita. 2010. “Los cauces profundos de la raza latinoamericana: una relectura del mestizaje.” Crítica y emancipación 2 (3): 11–43. ———. 2014. “La perspectiva de la colonialidad del poder.” In Aníbal Quijano: textos de fundación, edited by Zulma Palermo and Pablo Quintero, 10–42. Buenos Aires: Ediciones del Signo and Globalization and Humanities Project (Duke University). Stavenhagen, Rodolfo. [1965] 1970. “Siete tesis equivocadas sobre América Latina.” In América Latina: ensayos de interpretación sociológica-política, edited by Fernando H. Cardoso and F.Weffort, 82–94. Santiago, CH: Editorial Universitaria. Varner, John Grier. 1968. The Life and Times of Garcilaso de la Vega. Austin: University of Texas Press. Villena Fiengo, Sergio. 2016. “Palabras en ocasión de la entrega del doctorado Honoris Causa a Aníbal Quijano Obregón.” Anuario de Estudios Centroamericanos 42: 465–481. Walmsley, Anne. 1992. The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History. London: New Beacon Books. Walsh, Catherine, Freya Schiwy, and Santiago Castro-Gómez, eds. 2002. Indisciplinar las ciencias sociales: geopolíticas del conocimiento y colonialidad del poder: perspectivas desde lo andino. Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar; Abya Yala. We, Jeung Eun Annabel. 2019. “The Spirit of Bandung Beyond Colonial Mobility.” Bandung: Journal of the Global South 6: 190–209. Wynter, Sylvia. 1984. “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism.” Boundary 2 12 (3): 19–65. ———. 1989. Beyond the Word of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles. In World Literature Today 63 (4): 637–648. ———. 1991. “Columbus and the Poetics of the Propter Nos.” Annals of Scholarship 8 (2): 251–286. ———. 2001. “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black’.” In National Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America, edited by Mercedes F. Durán-Cogan and Antonio Gómez-Moriana, 30–66. London: Routledge. ———. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337. ———. [1962] 2010. The Hills of Hebron. Kingston, JM: Ian Randle Publishers.

131

7 THE ECOCRITICAL TURN AND THE STUDY OF EARLY COLONIAL SOCIETIES IN THE CARIBBEAN Of dogs, rivers, and the environmental humanities Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert

Introduction Eduardo Galeano’s 1971 book, The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent, introduced Latin American and Caribbean readers to the new—albeit still unnamed— multidisciplinary field of political ecology, an approach that analyzes “environmental change as a result of power relations, which cause highly variable access to resources” (Brannstrom 2017). Galeano’s impassioned indictment of the resource-extraction economic model imposed on the newly discovered lands of the Caribbean and Latin America by colonial rule, particularly in the first centuries of Spanish control, rested on the denunciation of a history of ecological resources being transmuted into European capital, with devastating effects for local ecologies: “Everything: the soil, its fruits and its mineral-rich depths, the people and their capacity to work and to consume, natural resources and human resources” (Galeano 1971, 2). Together with Alfred Crosby’s The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, published a year later, which explored the biotic impact of Christopher Columbus’ encounter with the Americas, it framed a new ecology-focused approach to the study of the continent’s colonial history (1972). Crosby’s book introduced concepts, theories and multidisciplinary methodologies for the study of what it labeled “ecological imperialism” through a focus on epidemiology and the deeply transformative transoceanic exchange of plants and animals. Galeano and Crosby’s combined work had a galvanizing impact on the ways in which scholars approach the history of the region, spearheading an “ecological turn” that inspired highly influential environment-focused reassessments of regional environmental history like Elinor Melville’s pioneering A Plague of Sheep (1994), Richard Grove’s Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (1995), Shawn

132

The ecocritical turn

William Miller’s An Environmental History of Latin America (2007), and Reinaldo Funes Monzote’s From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History since 1492 (2008). In the discussion that follows, I trace the contributions of this “postcolonial ecologies turn” to our understanding of early colonial cultural production in the Caribbean region in the decades that have elapsed since Galeano and Crosby’s seminal studies. I am particularly interested in how theories and methodologies associated with “ecological imperialism” (which incorporate postcolonial ecocriticism, biology, ecology, the study of fauna and flora extinctions, geography, oceanic and archipelagic studies, and forestry, among others) have contributed to a new understanding of the interactions between humans and nature in the colonial Caribbean, particularly in the first two centuries following the arrival of Spanish conquistadors to the region, a period during which extractive economic practices and colonial institutions took shape. My analysis is rooted in the environmental humanities—a subfield that redefines the relationship between the humanities and the social and natural sciences through the exploration of the ways in which literary theory and criticism, history, philosophy, geography, anthropology and political ecology come together to help illuminate the conjunctions across the physical, political, and imaginative dimensions of our world. From this perspective, I look at how a re-reading of colonial texts and analysis of early maps from an ecocritical perspective allows us to understand colonialism and coloniality in the Caribbean region as a cascading series of “ecological revolutions” (a concept developed by Melville in A Plague of Sheep), each of them representing “an abrupt and qualitative break with the process of environmental and social change that had developed in situ” (Melville 1994, 12). I explore three examples of the impact of ecological revolutions in the Caribbean basin during the first century of the conquest—Walter Raleigh intimations of faunal evolution amidst pristine river landscapes, the vexing question of the mute dogs of the conquered, and the deterioration of the river ecologies that so transfixed early discoverers—as embodying the potential of ecology-based analysis for our understanding of the texts of the early conquest. Melville’s focus in A Plague of Sheep—a study directly inspired by Crosby’s work—is on the sixteenth-century history of the Valle del Mezquital, Mexico (1530–1600) and the profound ecological changes brought about by the introduction of European “portmanteau biota,” particularly hoofed grazing animals (ungulates).Their presence, in the space of seven decades, transformed a verdant, densely populated agricultural area bordered by broad grasslands and forests into an arid and desolate plain, changing, in the process, the existing system of land tenure based on communal land holdings and ushering in a new economy based on large privately held estates. The study convincingly links “abrupt and qualitative” environmental changes— “ecological revolutions” like those that so deeply marked the Valle del Mezquital—to the processes that allowed Spanish newcomers to take control over these new territories. These ecological revolutions include the early fauna extinctions and food insecurity described by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo in his Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535); the persistent deforestation of the islands that can be traced from Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s Los infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (1690) to Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l’isle Saint-Domingue (1789); the exploitation of natural resources that we can trace through the pictorial narrative offered by The Drake Manuscript (1586); and most particularly the legacy of the environmental violence of the sugar plantation as evidenced in countless texts, maps, and visual works. Embedded in these representations of ecological revolutions are a number of colonial relationships to the environment that engage central themes in artistic and literary production in the region: extractive economies, land tenure, diaspora, slavery and indentured servitude, family networks, and community, among others. 133

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert

Theoretically, I draw on the work of postcolonial ecologists who address the intersections among history, literature, cultural practices and the environment in the Caribbean. From Elizabeth DeLoughrey (Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures, 2007) to Rob Nixon (Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2011), postcolonial ecological theory takes as a point of departure the idea that from its earliest manifestations Caribbean cultural production has continuously addressed “rather than belatedly discovered, its commitment to the environment, reiterating its insistence on the inseparability of current crises of ecological mismanagement from historical legacies of imperialistic exploitation and authoritarian abuse” (Huggan 2007, 702). DeLoughrey, Renée Gosson, and George Handley underscore this point in their introduction to Caribbean Literature and the Environment (2005), where they write that “[u]nlike the white settler culture of nature writing, Caribbean writers refuse to depict the natural world in terms that erase the relationship between landscape and power”(4). In the work of scholars examining early colonial texts and visual culture—Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Richard Grove, Peter Hulme, Ursula Heise, among others—a focus on the environmental burden colonialism placed on the Caribbean region unearths the root of current challenges to the region’s nations, confronting the compromised ecologies that are colonialism’s chief legacies.This preoccupation with colonial history is linked both to the environmental humanities and to current formulations of the Anthropocene—geology’s chronological term for the period defined by the human impact on the Earth’s ecosystems, primarily through our growing numbers and the burning of fossil fuels—a period that gives rise to what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “the historicist paradox that inhabits contemporary moods of anxiety and concern about the finitude of humanity” (Chakrabarty 2009, 197). The environmental anxieties surrounding the early centuries of the conquest of the Caribbean region, as I will argue below, often revolve around preoccupation with loss, particularly—in the case of the immediate impact of the fateful 1492 on the Caribbean region—with biodiversity and cultural losses linked to extinctions and invasive species (see Paravisini-Gebert 2014; Heise 2016), sustainability and indigenous management of natural resources (Hulme 1987; Heckbert, Constanza, and Parrot 2014), deforestation (Funes Monzote 2008; Paravisini-Gebert 2011) and the emergence of the plantation (Beinart and Hughes 2007, among others). The ecocritical scholarship surrounding these losses recognizes both the impact of the ecological revolutions brought about by colonialism, and the necessity of accounting for their history at a time when human behavior has precipitated a worldwide environmental crisis. As John Miller argues in his discussion of Stephen M. Meyer’s The End of the Wild (2006), “a failure to account adequately for the consequences of our actions or to acknowledge fully a responsibility to other beings and the systems of life in which they are imbricated leads … to a greatly simplified biosphere in which the human has become the ultimate evolutionary force” (Miller 2013, 208).

Ecoreading the colonial classics: of Raleigh, biodiversity and river landscapes Ecocritical approaches—inherently multidisciplinary—offer tools for deeper explorations of neglected aspects of early colonial texts. Consider, for example, the new possible ecocritical/ multidisciplinary readings of Sir Walter Raleigh’s Historie of the World (1614). Written during his imprisonment in the Tower of London, the Historie of the World is Raleigh’s most ambitious work in prose. Intended as a multivolume project but never completed, it covers the creation of the world to 146 B.C. while incorporating multiple reflections drawn from his experiences as a colonial explorer.These reflections lead him toward important formulations about the evolution of fauna that question the fundamental tenet of creationism, the stability of species created in immutable forms, which together with his experiences in the burgeoning American colonies, 134

The ecocritical turn

where he saw local varieties of familiar species and observed their adaptability to their specific surroundings, afforded him unique opportunities for understanding of evolutionary processes. In his discussion of the Flood, Raleigh argues that “it is manifest, and undoubtedly true, that many of the Species, which now seeme differing, and of severall kindes, were not then in rerum natura. For those Beasts which are of mixt natures, eyther they were not in that age, or else it was not needfull to preserve them, seeing they might be generated againe by others: as the Mules, the Hyœna’s, and the like; the one begotten by Asses and Mares, the other by Foxes and Wolves” (Raleigh 1621, 94). Raleigh links his insights into the changing nature of species and the impact of hybridity and cross-breeding in this “new” world directly to his own experiences in the Americas and knowledge of colonial incursions into the East, citing the discovery of “strange Lands, wherein there are found divers Beasts and Birds differing in colour or stature from those of these Northerne parts,” and pointing out how, “for my owne opinion, I find no difference, but onely in magnitude, betweene the Cat of Europe, and the Ownce of India; and even those Dogges which are become wilde in Hispagniola, with which the Spaniards used to devoure the naked Indians, are now changed to Wolves, and begin to destroy the breed of their Cattell, and doe also oftentimes teare asunder their owne Children” (Raleigh 1621, 94). Anticipating the field of biogeography through his interest in the distribution of species and ecosystems across geographies and climates, Raleigh also acknowledges what will be the foundation of Crosby’s transformative “Columbian exchange,” reminding his readers of how the bounty of new flora and fauna newly discovered in the New World has transformed known European species: “We also see it dayly, that the natures of Fruits are changed by transplantation, some to better, some to worse, especially with the change of Clymate. Crabs may be made good Fruit by often grafting, and the best Melons will change in a yeere or two to common Cowcummers, by being set in a barren Soyle” (Raleigh 1621, 94). There is in this a belief in the proliferation of difference through human and nonhuman agents coming together in new and incipiently modern transnational environments marked by ecological and racial hybridities. These are spaces where knowledge is transformed through biotic discovery and experimentation and transmitted globally through the circulation of books (natural histories, most particularly), maps, and, increasingly, through visual culture—spaces that have provided the impetus for new environmentally-focused explorations of the texts and cultural production of the early colonial period. In the case of Raleigh’s History of the World and The Discoverie of the Large and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana (1596) ecocritical approaches have yielded innovative re-readings that have highlighted both the complex biopolitics of the History (see Swarbrick 2017) and theorized the relationship between the human and the waterscape. Lowell Nelson Duckert’s study (2012) of how the rivers of Guiana can challenge “the bifurcation of nature and culture, human and nonhuman” in The Discoverie offers an ecocritical invitation to a re-engagement with the texts of the early colonial period: “By reconceiving landscape as a mediary rather than intermediary image, Raleigh’s Discoverie inhabits the interchange, not the ‘breach,’ between nature and culture. The Guianan riverscape (or waterscape, or any—scape) challenges the separation between the human body (flows of blood), the narrative text (flows of meaning) and the natural world (flows of in/organic matter-energy). Like him, we have much to discover” (Duckert 2012, 42). The Caribbean, Elizabeth DeLoughrey has argued, “provides a fitting frame for an ecocritical analysis because it is one of the most radically altered landscapes in the world and, as Richard Grove (1995) has shown, the space from which our current understandings of environmental conservation emerged” (DeLoughrey 2007, 62). Hence the urge to revisit early colonial texts whose narratives presuppose what DeLoughrey calls “a continuum between nature and its cultural mediation” (DeLoughrey 2009, 62) in order to explore the new possibilities opened by environment-driven theories and methodologies. I want to return in this exploration to 135

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert

Raleigh’s reference above to “those Dogges which are become wilde in Hispagniola, with which the Spaniards used to devoure the naked Indians” (Raleigh 1621, 42) as an example of how the concern with the nonhuman world that is part and parcel of environmental theory and methodological approaches places early colonial texts in new and unexpected conversations.

The mute dogs of the conquered In Book Two, Chapter XIII, of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s La historia general y natural de las Indias (1535), the first official chronicler of the New World notes the first known fauna extinctions directly caused by the diverging demands placed by indigenous and European populations on the environment. En este tiempo de tanta necesidad se comieron los chriptianos quantos perros gozquez avía en esta isla, los quales eran mudos que no ladraban, é comieron también los que de España avian traydo, é comiéronse todas las hutias que pudieron aver, é todos los quemis é otros animals que llaman mohuy y todos los otros que llaman coris, que son como gazapos ó conejos pequeños. Estas quatro maneras de animals se caçaban con los perros que se avian traydo de España; é desque ovieron acabado los de la tierra, comiéronse a ellos también, en pago de su serviçio. During these times of so much want, the Christians ate all the dogs that were to be found on the island, which were mute, they did not bark; and they also ate those they had brought from Spain, and they ate all the hutías that were to be found, and all the quemis, and other animals they called mohuy, and all the ones they call coris, that are like young or small rabbits. These four types of animals were hunted with the help of the dogs that had been brought from Spain; and which were eaten in their turn—in payment for their services—after they finished off the ones found in this land. (González Fernández de Oviedo 1851–1855, 50, my translation) The debate over Fernández de Oviedo’s “mute dogs” and their purported colonization-driven extinction has proven to be one of the most fruitful narratives of early colonial history in the Caribbean region, both in terms of the many narratives produced by Fernández de Oviedo’s sixteenth-century contemporaries—eager to put their two-maravedís’ worth into the debate— but also in terms of the number of studies it has generated from contemporary scholars, especially those working on ecocritical engagements with early colonial texts. The vexed and still-vexing questions about the nature, species, muteness, even the very existence of these dogs, has emerged as one of the most entrancing stories in discussions about Caribbean fauna, animal domestication, species conservation, and ultimately, extinction. In Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (2016), Ursula Heise underscores the need to “focus on the larger narratives that enable individuals’ efforts to resonate with larger social networks” (20). In the chronicles and natural histories that emerged from the early conquest, the nature and fate of the Caribbean’s “mute dogs” become one such narrative. They resonate against our contemporary environmentalist and conservationist perspectives on fauna driven to extinction because, as Heise argues, “public engagement with endangered species depends on these broader structures of imagination, and individuals’ paths to conservation engagement become meaningful for others only within these cultural frameworks. Ultimately … biodiversity, endangered species, and extinction are primarily cultural issues, questions of what we value and what stories we tell, and only secondarily issues of science” (2016, 20). 136

The ecocritical turn

The complex story of the Caribbean’s mute dog has long fascinated scholars. Dr. Barton, in his collection of “all the necessary materials for an exact history of the native dogs of North America” (Barton 1803), carefully traces the multiple references to the tale of the elusive dogs in early colonial texts, from their first appearance in Columbus’ diaries from October 1492 through their multiple description in Bartolomé de las Casas’ account of Columbus’ discoveries as “dogs which never barked” and were chiefly bred for food (qtd. in Thacher 1903, 553); their appearance in Pietro Martire d’Anghiera’s Decades of the New World (1511) as “deformed in shape” and eaten by the indigenous population as “the Europeans did of goats” (Martire d’Anghiera 1885, 76); and the detailed description narrative offered by Andrés Bernáldez that speaks of Columbus’ sighting 40 non-barking dogs on a beach covered with turtle shells between Cuba and Jamaica (Bernáldez 1856, 315). Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo also offers a compelling description of a small dog, known as gosque, a well-fed domesticated companion, “always eager to please those who fed them and whom they recognized as their masters” (Fernández de Oviedo 2002, 119–120); “All these dogs, here and on the other islands, are mute, and even if beaten or killed, would not bark, although they growl or moan when hurt” (30). These domesticated pre-European dogs, often found as companions in indigenous homes throughout the Caribbean and the mainland (and occasionally as part of the indigenous diet or as a sacrificial animal), came in many sizes, colors and shapes, thereby complicating their identification, history, and role in local ecologies. In the Caribbean region, they were most commonly described as having pointed ears (compared by chroniclers of the conquest to those of wolves), long snouts and long and powerful limbs (Fernández de Oviedo 1851–1855, 30). Imported from the South American mainland “after the appearance of ceramic-bearing Saladoid agricultural colonists … during the first millennium before Christ” (Stahl 2013, 516), the dogs were one of the most salient of a very small number of domesticated species kept by Amerindians, as well as one of the first indigenous sources of meat for the newly arrived colonists. Early European chroniclers found them to be quite similar to the European dogs of their experience, except for their striking muteness. Luís Joseph Peguero, in his 1762 Historia de la conquista de la isla Española de Santo Domingo, offers a drawing based on descriptions from various chronicles, a representation that mirrors images drawn on cave paintings and Amerindian sculptures (Figure 7.1).These local dogs are thought to have disappeared as a result of an increase in consumption due to a growing European population and the introduction of European dogs bred for war (see Varner and Varner 1983; Piqueras 2006). Oviedo describes stuffed dog as a local delicacy, while Fray Diego de Landa found them to be quite “tasty” (1966, 135). Occasionally they can be found on burial grounds, as offerings accompanying the dead to the next world, functioning as protectors of the liminal space between the living and the dead. The dogs are featured in the first narratives of extinction that emerge from the chronicles of the European conquest. Oviedo marks their disappearance in the Sumario of his natural history in 1526, but their fate had not gone unnoticed in indigenous lore, as it featured in the narrative of Friar Ramón Pané, a priest who had arrived with Columbus on his second voyage, having been commissioned to write a report for the admiral on the beliefs of the indigenous population of the Antilles. The report, completed by 1498, includes the following tale, which appears to incorporate an indigenous consciousness of the dog’s local extinction in Hispaniola as a direct result of Spanish colonization. It is of particular interest that, unlike Oviedo, Pané does not note the tale of extinction as one of his own observation, but as something told to him: El cual cerní Opiyelguobirán dicen que tiene cuatro pies, como de perro, y es de madera, y que muchas veces por la noche salía de casa y se iba a las selvas. Allí iban a buscarlo, y vuelto a casa lo ataban con cuerdas; pero él se volvía a las selvas.Y cuando 137

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert

Figure 7.1  I llustration from Luís Joseph Peguero’s Historia de la conquista de la isla Española de Santo Domingo [Manuscript] (1762–63), showing his rendition of a New-World mute dog. Reproduced by permission of the Biblioteca Nacional de España.

los cristianos llegaron a la dicha isla Española, cuentan que éste se escapó y se fue a una laguna; y que aquéllos lo siguieron hasta allí por sus huellas, pero que nunca más lo vieron, ni saben nada de él. Como lo compré, así también lo vendo. (Pané 1974, 49) The semi Opiyelguobirán has four feet, like a dog, they say, and is made of wood, and often at night he leaves the house and goes into the jungle. They went to look for him there, and when they brought him home, they would tie him up with rope, but he would return to the jungle. And they tell me that when the Christians arrived on the Island of Hispaniola, the zemi escaped and went into a lagoon; and they followed his tracks as far as the lagoon, but they never saw him again, nor did they hear anything about him. As I buy, so also do I sell. (Pané 1974, 45) These extinct New-World dogs have emerged in contemporary scholarship as the focus of a body of environmentally-centered multidisciplinary work through which we can measure some of the salient contributions of ecological approaches to the study of early colonial Caribbean texts, which have become central elements in studies that range from literature to the sciences. One of the best examples of the early success of ecocritical approaches is Antonello Gerbi’s landmark study Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1971), particularly in his perceptive discussion of Oviedo’s Natural History. Gerbi focuses particularly on Oviedo’s proto-scientific methodology, particularly his commitment to accurate descriptions of fauna and flora based on direct observation and experience, which represents an innovative New-World paradigm for the depiction of the natural phenomena. His approach— close observation and detailed description across differing conditions and seasons, discussions with the indigenous populations about their knowledge and experiences with fauna and flora, and his reliance on experimentation, constitutes an “enthusiastic eulogy of the environment” 138

The ecocritical turn

(Gibson 1980, 321), an openness to new approaches to ecologies and environments at the moment Europeans find themselves on the threshold of a new era. Gerbi will himself discuss the mute dogs of the New World in connection to Oviedo’s curiosity about the strangeness of their barkless condition and his experiments in relocating pet dogs from Nicaragua to Panama and from coastline to mainland to ascertain if the condition was related to location. His determination to take a dog he had trained himself to Spain to continue his experiment was thwarted by the theft of the pet, whose loss Oviedo deeply regretted, as “I had brought him up and he was very tame” (Gerbi 1985, 295–296). Alfredo Bueno Jiménez’s attention to the role of dogs in bolstering the food security of the conquering Spaniards as they moved from the archipelago into the mainland without a reliable source of protein is another example of the perspectives opened by ecological approaches (2011). His study draws on early texts (particularly natural histories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) and visual representations (chiefly Theodore de Bry’s illustrations) to create a biogeographic backdrop for the study of both the extinction of endemic New-World dogs and the use of European dogs as weapons of war. The concerns with food cultures and food security—with food studies in general—spearheaded in the Caribbean and Latin American regions by the writings of Sidney Mintz (2010), has been drawn into the field of environmental studies and the early colonial period through a scholarly focus on food insecurity, food cultures and rituals, and food and identity, all of them elements tied to the quickly changing ecosystems of the New World as they faced numerous ecological revolutions (See Paravisini-Gebert 2011). These are aspects explored by Óscar Rueda Pimiento in his study of Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada’s expedition into the interior of Colombia (1536–1537), which is intended as “a contribution to the limited research that exists around the food crisis and feeding during the conquest of the territory” (Rueda Pimiento 2015, 99) and focuses on the struggles with hunger faced by a small expeditionary force unaccustomed to available foods and the cultural principles that form the basis for acceptance or rejection of local foods. Dogs emerge in this study as occasionally available nourishment in short but welcome supply. Peter W. Stahl similarly draws on early texts of the conquest as a springboard for his comprehensive zoogeographical study of the dogs’ range across the archipelago and mainland and of the possible explanation for the muteness and limited types of vocalization described in the early chronicles. His work is significant for merging textual analysis of early colonial chronicles and natural histories with current scientific knowledge of species hybridity and patterns of canid domestication across South America. His work brings detailed attention to the multiplicity of canid species through the Caribbean and the Spanish Main, with particular attention to testing the various species that could have contributed to the evolution of canid species in the New World. When reading these early texts, the focus of these scholars is firmly placed on engaging the moments of highly significant epistemological shifts they capture through the prism of new perspectives: an understanding of species in their habitats and ecologies, food security, species hybridity and the history of scientific experimentation, and visual representation as a tool for both broader dissemination of natural history information and an aesthetic tool for the appreciation of New-World fauna and flora. They all share a premise that the early colonial period was crucial for the conception of modern science and for our understanding of the unleashing of environmental changes we associate with the Anthropocene. Representations of the dogs and other endemic fauna of the Caribbean region have generated significant interest among those concerned with environmental approaches to early colonial phenomena. From archaeologists to art historians, this renewed attention has led to greater understanding of both the nature and hybridization of species of both flora and fauna and of local traditions and methods of visual representation previously neglected, bringing new 139

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert

scholarly attention to pre-Columbian and indigenous visual cultures and to Creole artistic expression. This has been the case, for example, of the seminal work done by Racso Fernández Ortega and his colleagues at the Cuban Cave Art Research Group (2011) in cataloging, describing, and analyzing pre-Columbian cave paintings and sculptures throughout the Caribbean region to examine the evolution of dog representations before and after the European encounter and their role in culture, religious practices, and the cosmovision of pre-encounter communities. Fernández Ortega and his team, as has become the established practice in these studies, review the numerous early colonial chronicles and natural histories as the foundational documents for their multi-disciplinary approaches to the complexity of canid representation in the early centuries of colonization. The extinct endemic dogs of the Caribbean basin continue to resonate among the region’s writers and artists. Known as xoloitzcuintle among the indigenous Mexicans, they feature prominently in Diego Rivera’s History of Mexico murals at the National Palace in Mexico City, where they appear in numerous guises, among them as a small fierce dog confronting a Spanish war dog. Gabriel García Márquez opens a 1997 essay on the continued impact of colonization on the youth of his native Colombia with a recollection of how the earliest Spanish conquerors had “in just a few years … caused the extinction of an exquisite species of mute dog raised by the Indians for food” (28). His meditation on the health and educational neglect of the children of Colombia brings him to the extinct dogs and the legacy of environmental indifference and farreaching ecological destruction they epitomize: “We adore dogs, carpet the world with roses, are overwhelmed by love of country, but we ignore the disappearance of six animal species each hour of the day and night because of criminal depredations in the rain forest, and have ourselves destroyed beyond recall one of the planet’s great rivers” (38).

On ecotones and the death of rivers The river of García Márquez’s regrets is the Río Grande de la Magdalena, Colombia’s principal river and one which in recent decades has been plagued by ever worsening environmental problems linked to bacterial and heavy metal contamination due to the country’s poor sanitary infrastructure. A vital route toward the interior of Colombia, it played a crucial role during the early centuries of the conquest and the war for independence. Indeed, in El general en su laberinto (1989), García Márquez offers the fictionalized account of Simón Bolívar’s final journey along the Magdalena River toward the Caribbean coast and exile in 1830.With detailed early colonial histories and descriptions of their features, characteristic flora and fauna, and local populations thanks to colonial chronicles, rivers have become spaces where the environmental revolutions caused by colonization can be traced in significant detail. In the case of the Magdalena River, we have a number of recent texts drawing upon colonial and contemporary texts to trace and denounce environmental degradation. Marta Milena Barrios and Toby Miller (2016), for example, analyze the level of emotion displayed in readers’ letters-to-the-editor of local newspapers that address “ecology, the conflict, and cultural identity,” particularly the threatened health of local rivers, urging lawmakers to protect natural resources, provide clean drinking water and sewage services, and calling for a stop to the contamination caused by mining and the continued discharge of industrial waste along the river.Their study echoes Ana María Mutis’ (2013) account of the death of the Magdalena River in García Márquez’s El amor en los tiempos del cólera and Laura Restrepo’s La novia oscura. But it is a different river, Santo Domingo’s Ozama, that I want to offer as my final example of the possibilities for fresh analysis of early colonial texts and images opened by ecocritical theories. Anyone wishing to understand the looming impact of climate change on the islands 140

The ecocritical turn

and populations of the Caribbean can find no better starting point than the city of Santo Domingo, sprawled over the Caribbean Coastal Plain and straddling the Ozama River, whose mouth is the city’s bustling port. Founded in 1496 on the east bank of the Ozama River by Bartolomé Colón, Columbus’ brother, it was moved to the west bank in 1502 by then governor Nicolás de Ovando after a devastating hurricane. The first seat of European colonial rule in the New World and its first official port, it is also the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement in the Americas. Its port received the first shipment of African slaves to the New World, and sent forth Francisco Pizzaro and Hernán Cortés to the discoveries of Peru and México, Diego Velázquez to Cuba, Rodrigo de Bastidas to discover Panama and Colombia, and Alonso de Ojeda toward Venezuela. As the earliest settlement in the region, the young city was the first ecotone—a transition zone between two biomes or a place where two communities meet and integrate—to undergo what Melville called an ecological revolution, that “abrupt and qualitative change” in its environment. The banks of the Ozama River constituted an ecotonal area, a fluid, shifting boundary between the river and the Caribbean Sea, a boundary quickly transformed by rapid environmental and social changes, some of them devastating to the biological and human communities that had thrived in place before the arrival of European settlers. Today, those river banks are home to deeply endangered communities of the poor threatened by the increasing impacts of climate change. Being the New World’s earliest permanent European settlement, we have a treasure throve of very early descriptions of the banks of this particular ecotone from which we can measure the trajectory of ecological losses the port has undergone, from bacterial contamination and metal pollution to the deterioration of its water quality. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s early sixteenthcentury descriptions of the zone illustrate its ecotonal foundations. When the Spaniards decided to move their earlier settlement on the north of the island (near today’s border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti) to found Santo Domingo, the mouth of the Ozama was occupied by several villages of indigenous peoples whose presence was recorded but of whose displacement we have no account. It is quite possible that they were simply absorbed into the incipient city. Oviedo describes the river as abundant with fish of all sorts and home to communities of manatees that the indigenous population hunted sustainably, according to archaeological studies of the middens of the area. The waters were praised for their purity and fresh taste, especially that of waterfalls feeding into the river, which as it neared the sea became too contaminated with sea water for drinking. The banks were lined with a broad variety of fruit trees and the settlers could hear the frequent songs of birds and the harsher tone of parrots. Oviedo notes the transition of grasses that are characteristic of ecotones, as well as the gradual transformation of fresh into sea water and the techniques of the indigenous population for hunting manatees, a familiarity that suggests a transitional period of co-inhabiting the river’s tidal geography. The Spanish settlers had explored both the Isabela and Ozama rivers and their tributaries and had noted the intricate water network and its use by communities inland to bring produce to the communities settled near the port area in exchange for fish, manatees, and other coastal sources of protein. They also noted frequent crossings between the east and west bank of the river that suggested an early form of water taxi. The earliest transformation of this ecotonal zone came shortly after the foundation of the Santo Domingo colony, first through the expansion of gold mining along the Cibao Valley (with the extracted gold transported along the Isabela and Ozama rivers to the Santo Domingo port), and the quick establishment of sugar plantations and cattle ranches in the valleys surrounding the newly founded city. Rapid increases in population and the incipient contamination of the river from mining and agricultural practices, runoff from significant deforestation, and soil erosion as 141

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert

a result of the cutting of trees meant that extractivist practices quickly left their imprint on the local environment and its main rivers. Of these practices, it was the cultivation of sugar cane by slave labor which had the most damaging and irreversible impact on the environment. Sugar production, which required massive deforestation to clear land for planting and for wood to feed the boilers, quickly evolved into an overwhelming ecological revolution (see Paravisini-Gebert 2011).These developments are traced in a fascinating study by Rosa Elena Carrasquillo focusing on the denaturalization of the native landscape surrounding the city of Santo Domingo between 1492 and 1548. For Carrasquillo, such transformation created a “Spanish” landscape through “processes of destruction and construction, population displacement and the racialization of space or racial infrastructures at the basis of Spanish imperial imagery” that highlight “the stillpresent destruction, violence and racism of the colonial landscape” (2019, 61). For the city of Santo Domingo, the historical continuity of the “destruction, violence and racism of the colonial landscape” is seen through the fate of the two rivers that join above the city to flow as the Ozama into the Caribbean at the city’s port. The city faces the same climaterelated quandaries as other urban centers in the region like San Juan and Kingston—coastal location of essential infrastructure (airports, thermoelectric plants, major highways); rapidly deteriorating reef systems increasingly vulnerable to bleaching events caused by rising sea temperatures; coastal erosion threatening vital tourism infrastructure; significant concentrations of people of lower socioeconomic status living in floodplains; threats to the availability and quality of fresh water; and high risk of food insecurity. But for the roughly 400,000 people living precariously along the banks of the Ozama River, their proximity to the river and its port increases their vulnerability. These are Santo Domingo’s poorest, most marginalized populations, pushed by rapid urbanization to the most vulnerable riverside land where they live in substandard housing in overcrowded neighborhoods. Persistent flooding threatens lives and property and brings residents into dangerous contact with the river’s highly polluted waters, bearing harmful bacteria from raw sewage and toxic concentrations of metals like thallium from untreated industrial runoff, which drastically impacts local wildlife as well as quality of life and health for local human communities.The bed of the Ozama, moreover, is below sea level, so as tidal flooding and coastal erosion from storm surges grow ever stronger due to climate change, the sea penetrates deep into the Ozama’s watershed, its salt-water infiltration adding to the population’s vulnerability to flooding and further contaminating the already deeply compromised freshwater supply. The Dominican poor living along the Ozama are considered by the World Bank to be among the world’s “most endangered people.” The deterioration of the Ozama represents the most radical transformation the city of Santo Domingo has undergone since its late fifteenth-century foundation, but most specifically in the twentieth century, which saw Santo Domingo change from a “small, clean, tree-covered, silent city … divided by an Ozama River not yet turned into mud and death” into a deeply endangered Caribbean mega-city (Alcántara Almánzar 2017, 52). Ecocritical approaches to the early colonial period have brought increased attention to visual studies through the incorporation of maps, drawings, prints, and cave art into the wealth of materials available for study. I offer here one example of the possibilities open to the environment-focused scholar of the early colonial period—that of Baptista Boazio’s 1588 “Civitas S. Dominici sita in Hispaniola [City of S. Domingo located in Hispaniola],” which captured the occupation of the city of Santo Domingo in 1586 when the English, led by Sir Francis Drake, held it for ransom for a month, destroying in the process all civic, military, and religious buildings. Figure 7.2 highlights the architectural beauty and wealth of the city, showing the cathedral, the first in the New World, as its most striking building. The map is full of movement and action— soldiers marching in formation, riders putting their horses through their military paces, burning ships, and even the detail of the boats the Spanish defenders had sunk at the mouth of the harbor 142

The ecocritical turn

Figure 7.2  B  aptista Boazio. From Expeditio Francisci Draki Eqvitis Angli in Indias Occidentales a. M.d. Lxxxv. Quâ Vrbes, Fanum D. Iacobi, D. Dominici, D. Augustini & Carthagena, Captae Fuêre. Additis Passim Regionum Locorúmque Omnium Tabulis Geographicis Quàm Accuratissimis, by Walter Bigges (1588). The Newberry Library.

to prevent the English ships from entering. The chart, perhaps the most famous of the port of Santo Domingo, is a beautiful example of how the history of sixteenth-century European political rivalries found its expression in visual culture. It establishes a lovely contrapuntal conversation with the work of another artist said to have accompanied Drake’s expedition, the anonymous Drake Manuscript (Histoire Naturelle des Indes, c.1585) whose 199 captioned watercolors of the fauna, flora and indigenous population of the Indies follow the trajectory of Drake’s ports of calls. Boazio’s picture of a serene and ordered occupation moves the focus away from Drake’s methodical burning and ransacking of the city and expulsion of the Spanish garrison while The Drake Manuscript offers a rich and endearing glimpse into Caribbean flora and fauna as well as of indigenous practices that underscore the sustainability of their relationship with nature. Boazio’s map offers us a snapshot of how the environment of the coastal valley of Santo Domingo had been transformed in the eight decades of Spanish occupation, roughly the period covered in Rosa Carrasquillo’s study of the transformation of the landscape. It shows the importance of the Ozama River to the city’s ecology, depicting its centrality to the fertility of the valley and the ready access to fresh water. Boazio captures eloquently the impact of livestock ranching through the movement of cattle across deforested fields, illustrating the impact of the 143

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert

ungulate irruption that had let to rapid and persistent deforestation in the valley surrounding the city.The denuded hills display the deforestation required to feed the boilers of the growing sugar plantations and the concomitant soil erosion that has left them stripped and bare. The land is now populated by domesticated European species—cattle, horses, sheep—the hooved species Elinor Melville examines as having destroyed Mexico’s central valley. The map shows quite comprehensively the extent to which European notions of land use had completely dominated the city’s surrounding landscape by the time of Drake’s invasion. Only the sea retains the wildness and tropicality of the original environment, offering us a glimpse into the breadth, liveliness, and mystery of its oceanic setting. As a prime example of the military mapping of the Antilles (Keeler 1978), Boazio’s map is also an invitation to an environmental reading of the type that is transforming early colonial scholarship in the Caribbean.

Conclusion My discussion seeks to push the boundaries of our definitions of the environmental humanities to encompass early colonial writers and mapmakers engaging the rapidly changing ecologies of the region and addressing the ruination that European colonization brought in its wake, creating in the process damaged ecologies whose deterioration is still felt across the archipelago and its basin.The focus on early colonial ecologies allows us to tease out the specificities of processes— of deforestation, extinctions, invasive species, botanical experiments—through which the Caribbean region was significantly transformed in the relatively short space of four to five decades. The examples I address briefly here are but a small sample of possible new readings of richly nuanced materials through which we can both come to understand the ways in which the unnatural violence done to natural processes during the conquest were lived and narrated but also the ways in which these processes force a constant reassessment of how the rapidly changing populations of the region lived with and related to nature. Reading the texts of the early colonial period about the Caribbean from an ecocritical perspective requires a new series of questions. In a battle for the hegemony over nature, what was lost in the shift from sustainable to exploitative management of the land? What, if anything, was gained? How did the extensive botanical experiments—which brought us the mango and the breadfruit—create a new set of imperatives that transformed cultural practices and local identities? In what ways did the incipient capitalism and the imposition of extractive economies of the early colony impact the literature and the arts of the region? The possible questions are too many to list. The answers can add valuable insights to the existing scholarship on the early colonial period that can illuminate texts and images through new perspectives. Yet this scholarship can also transform our understanding of our present, by incorporating new dimensions to the narrative of the region’s past. As the examples I offer here show, there is a rich body of environment-focused scholarship already available, one with a history dating back to the 1970s. The richness of the early colonial materials available to scholars, on the other hand, represents an invitation to a re-reading of colonial texts and visual culture through the prism of the environmental changes whose history they contain, waiting to be unveiled.

Works cited Alcántara Almánzar, José. 2017. Reflejos del siglo veinte dominicano. Santo Domingo: Editorial Santuario. Barrios, Marta Milena and Toby Miller. 2016. “Green Passion Afloat: The Discourse of Colombia’s Magdalena River in Letters to the Editor.” Journalism Studies 1–16. Barton, Benjamin Smith. 1803. “On Indian Dogs.” The Philosophical Magazine 15 (58): 1–9. Beinart, William, and Lotte Hughes. 2007. Environment and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

144

The ecocritical turn Bernáldez, Andrés. 1856. Historia de los Reyes Católicos D. Fernando y Da. Isabel. Crónica Inédita del Siglo XVI. Vol. 1. Granada, SP: José María Zamora. Boazio, Baptista. 1588. “Civitas S. Dominici sita in Hispaniola [City of S. Domingo located in Hispaniola].” In Expeditio Francisci Draki Eqvitis Angli in Indias Occidentales a. M.d. Lxxxv. Quâ Vrbes, Fanum D. Iacobi, D. Dominici, D. Augustini & Carthagena, Captae Fuêre. Additis Passim Regionum Locorúmque Omnium Tabulis Geographicis Quàm Accuratissimis, edited by Walter Bigges and Lieutenant Croftes. Leydæ: Apud Fr. Raphelengium. Brannstrom, Christian. 2017. “Political Ecology.” In obo in Geography. http://www.oxfordbibliographies. com/view/document/obo-9780199874002/obo-9780199874002-0002.xml Bueno Jiménez, Alfredo. 2011. “Los perros de la conquista de América: History and Iconography.” Chronica Nova 37: 177–204. Carrasquillo, Rosa Elena. 2019. “La creación del primer paisaje colonial español en las Américas, Santo Domingo, 1492–1548.” Antípoda: Revista de Antropología y Arqueología 36: 61–84. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2009. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2): 197–222. Crosby, Alfred. [1972] 2003. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. New York: Praeger. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, Renée Gosson, and George Handley, eds. 2005. Caribbean Literatures and the Environment. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth. 2007. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press. ———. 2009. “Quantum Landscapes: A ‘Ventriloquism of Spirit.’” Interventions 9 (1): 62–82. Duckert, Lowell Nelson. 2012. “Waterscapes of Desire: Composing with the Elements in Early Modern Drama and Travel Writing.” PhD diss., George Washington University. Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Gonzalo. 1851–1855. Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y tierra firme del mar océano. Edited by José Amador de los Ríos. Madrid: Imprenta de la Real Academia Española. ———. 2002. Sumario de la Natural Historia de las Indias. Edited by Manuel Ballesteros. Madrid: Dastin. Fernández Ortega, Racso, Divaldo Gutiérrez Calvahe, José B. González Tendero, and Juan Cuza Huartt. 2011. “Sobre la presencia del perro en el legado rupestre de los aborígenes de las Antillas.” Cuba Arqueológica. Paper presented at the VIII Conferencia Internacional de Antropología, 2006. http://www. cubaarqueologica.org/index.php?q=node/282 Funes Monzote, Reinaldo. 2008. From Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History since 1492. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Galeano, Eduardo. [1971] 1997. The Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. New York: Monthly Review Press. García Márquez, Gabriel. 1997. “For a Country within Reach of the Children.” Translated by Edith Grossman. Américas 49 (6): 28–39. ———. 1989. El general en su laberinto. Bogota, CO: Editorial Oveja Negra. Gerbi, Antonello. 1971. Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. Translated by Jeremy Moyle (1985). Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Gibson, Charles. 1980. “La naturaleza de las Indias nuevas: De Cristóbal Colón a Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo by Antonello Gerbi.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 60 (2): 320–321. Grove, Richard. 1995. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heckbert, Scott, Roberto Constanza, and Lael Parrott. 2014. “Achieving Sustainable Societies: Lessons from Modelling the Ancient Maya.” Solutions 5 (5): 55–64. Heise, Ursula K. 2016. Imagining Extinction:The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Huggan, Graham. 2007. “Postcolonialism, Ecocriticism and the Animal in Recent Canadian Fiction.” In Culture, Creativity and Environment: New Environmentalist Criticism, edited by Fiona Beckett and Terry Gifford, 161–180. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Hulme, Peter. 1987. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797. London: Routledge. Keeler, Mary Frear. 1978. “The Boazio Maps of 1585–86.” Terra Incognitae 10 (1): 71–80. Landa, Fray Diego de. 1966. Relación de las cosas de Yucatán. México City: Porrúa. Martire d’Anghiera, Pietro. 1885. The First Three English Books on America [of The decades of the newe worlde or west India conteynyng the nauigations and conquestes of the Spanyardes with the particular description of the moste ryche and large landes and Ilands lately founde in the west Ocean perteynyng to the inheritaunce of the kinges of Spayne] Edited by Edward Arber and translated by Richard Eden (London, 1555). Birmingham: Printed by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh. https://archive.org/details/firstthreeenglis00arberich

145

Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert Melville, Elinor G. K. 1994. A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meyer, Stephen. 2006. The End of the Wild. Somerville, MA: Boston Review. Miller, John. 2013. “Biodiversity and the Abyssal Limits of the Human.” Symplokē 21 (1–2): 207–220. Miller, Shawn William. 2007. An Environmental History of Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mintz, Sidney W. 2010. “Food Enigmas, Colonial and Postcolonial.” Gastronomica 10 (1): 149–154. Mutis, Ana María. 2013. “The Death of the River and the River of Death:The Magdalena River in El amor en los tiempos del cólera and La novia oscura.” In Troubled Waters: Rivers in Latin American Imagination, edited by Elizabeth Pettinaroli and Ana María Mutis. Hispanic Issues On Line 12: 145–157. https://conservancy. umn.edu/handle/11299/184417 Nixon, Rob. 2011. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pané, Ramón. 1974. Relación acerca de las antigüedades de los indios. El primer tratado escrito en América. Mexico City: Siglo XXI. Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth. 2011. “Deforestation and the Yearning for Lost Landscapes in Caribbean Literatures.” In Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley, 99–116. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2014. “Extinctions: Chronicles of Vanishing Fauna in the Colonial and Post-Colonial Caribbean.” In The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard, 340–357. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2016. “Food, Biodiversity, Extinctions: Caribbean Fauna and the Struggle for Food Security during the Conquest of the New World.” Journal of West Indian Literature 24 (2): 11–26. Peguero, Luis Joseph. 1762–63. Historia de la conquista de la isla española de Santo Domingo: Traducida de la Historia General de las Indias, escrita por Antonio de Herrera, y de otros autores que han escrito sobre el particular. Biblioteca Nacional del España. Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, http://bdh.bne.es/bnesearch/detalle/ bdh0000010189 Piqueras, Ricardo. 2006. “Los perros de la Guerra o el ‘canibalismo canino’ en la conquista.” Boletín Americanista (Revistes Cientifíques de la Universitat de Barcelona) 56: 187–202. Raleigh, Walter. 1621. The Historie of the World in Five Books. Part I: Book I. London: William Jaggard. Rueda Pimiento, Óscar Eduardo. 2015. “Consideraciones en torno a la alimentación en la expedición de Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada al interior de Colombia (1536–1537). Aportes para una antropología del asco.” Boletín de Antropología (Universidad de Antioquia, Medellín) 30 (49): 98–119. Stahl, Peter W. 2013. “Early Dogs and Endemic South American Canids of the Spanish Main.” Journal of Anthropological Research 69 (4): 515–533. Swarbrick, Steven. 2017. “Tempestous Life: Ralegh’s Ocean in Ruins.” Criticism 59 (4): 539–563. Thacher, John Boyd. 1903. Christopher Columbus: His Life, His Work, His Remains. New York: G. P. Putnam. Varner, John Grier, and Jeanette Johnson Varner. 1983. Dogs of the Conquest. Tulsa, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

146

8 COLONIALITY AND CINEMA Juan Poblete

Structurally, the two concepts at the center of this essay, cinema and coloniality, share a reliance on visuality, looking, and perception to construct their socially relevant and powerful meanings. If cinema is centrally visual, so is coloniality, understood here as the capacity of power to impose a Eurocentric classification of world populations and the corresponding worldview, according to a racial pattern that placed Europeans at the top of the hierarchy and so-called people of color at the bottom, in order to justify and perpetuate exploitation (Quijano 2000; Alcoff 2006). Both concepts have at their core the combination of a certain form of power and an ocular relation of perception of the self and others, in relation to themselves and reciprocally. The connections established between visuality, power, knowledge, capitalism and exploitation have been many over the years. In the words of Martin Jay, himself one the great scholars of the ups and downs of philosophical visuality: “One need only mention Michel Foucault’s work on surveillance and the panopticon, Guy Debord’s critique of ‘the society of the spectacle,’ and John Berger’s exploration of the ‘ways of seeing’ to signal the widespread fascination with this theme” (Jay 1988, 4). Referring to the philosophical work of Jurgen Habermas on communicative rationality and the perils of detached observation as an epistemological position, David Michael Levin explains how “in the objectivist paradigm generated by traditional ocularcentrism, the subject is invariably positioned either in the role of a dominating observer or in the role of an observable object, submissive before the gaze of power” (Levin 1993, 4).The issue of the gaze in psychoanalysis, feminist, and postcolonial film theory, as will be shown below, has also been crucial to these scholarly traditions. More recently, the power of the image for social governance and the displacement of the written by the visual, and of cognitive understanding by sensation-based feeling and affect in a culture full of screens, have also emerged as important topics in the overall field of Visual Culture (Väliaho 2014). Even more recently, that field has welcomed its first systematic attempt to consider colonialism and slavery as central to Visual Culture Studies: Nicholas Mirzoeff ’s book, The Right to Look, has the significant subtitle: A Counterhistory of Visuality. In Latin American studies there has been a growing interest in the topics of visuality, coloniality, and race as shown by historians of pintura de castas such as Magali Carrera (2012) and Ilona Katzew (2005), and scholars such as Deborah Poole, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Robert Stam and Serge Gruzinski to whose work I return below. In what follows I will develop some of these issues, first, in relation to cinema, then to coloniality. I will continue with indigenous and national critiques of the coloniality of cinema. The definition of coloniality—as a Eurocentric structure of power organizing the world economy, science and concepts of the self and others—will then ground a tripartite structure (labor, knowledge and subjectivity) for the rest of this chapter.

147

Juan Poblete

The cinematic gaze In a very insightful overview discussing the importance of the male gaze as a key theoretical concept in feminist film studies through an analysis of power, visuality and corporeality, Corinn Columpar distinguishes it from the ethnographic and the colonial gaze to which it is closely connected. Reviewing Laura Mulvey’s seminal 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” responsible for the place the male gaze as a conceptual tool has in film studies, Columpar usefully reminds us that Mulvey’s two basic dynamics: “fetishistic scopophilia … and sadistic voyeurism” (Columpar 2002, 28)—while critical of the male gaze and illuminating about the strategic masculinization the female spectator needed to undergo in order to enjoy dominant cinema—tended to privilege a monolithic identification between “the look, mastery, and masculinity” (32). This is problematic not only because it does not consider the possibility of a male gaze that may be masochistic and not only sadistic and controlling, but also because it fails to historicize psychoanalysis and the gaze itself. Once history is considered, the issue of “how some groups historically had the license to ‘look’ openly while other groups ‘looked’ illicitly” (Jane Gaines, quoted by Columpar, 32) becomes crucial if one is to recognize “the plurality of historical experience and the recognition of multiple axes of oppression” (33). Given its visual base, race turns into one of visual history’s closest connections with the intertwined trajectories of both anthropology and imperialism and their respective dominant ethnographic and colonial gazes. Citing Fatimah Tobing Rony’s The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle (1996), Columpar concludes that “ethnographic cinema denies the anthropological subject historical agency, individual voice, and psychological complexity, it reduces him/her to a racial ‘type’ and constructs him/her as ‘ethnographiable,’ as one existing outside of or, more accurately, prior to history” (36) in what Johannes Fabian has called “denial of coevalness” (1983) and Anne McClintock, “anachronistic time” (1995). In this way, not only were the various natives defined as primitive and belonging to a pre-historic time and affording a glimpse of it, but also whiteness was affirmed as norm in relation to which the ‘primitive’ was a different other. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam (1994) emphasize the way in which film spectators across the globe are interpellated to establish a link and identity with white Euro-Americans in the context of former imperial territories. Because of their disciplinary content which “rendered native bodies docile by issuing a mandate for [natives’] imitation of the dominant culture” (Columpar, 39), i.e., because those films functioned not only to produce white identification but also the internalization of whiteness by non-whites as their desired identity, as theorized by Frantz Fanon, such films can be thought of as colonial. While the ethnographic gaze tried hard to imagine uncontaminated natives living in the past, the colonial gaze made “indigenous people’s access to [their own] subjectivity contingent on a self-regulation of their otherness” (39), forcing them to internalize racism by libidinally identifying with the white master. Columpar concludes: “the three gazes [the male, ethnographic and colonial gazes] can be seen as a single ideological project … [of] Western, white, male [normativity]” (40). These connected gazes, however, need to be historicized in connection with their specific geopolitical contexts, fundamental institutions (“patriarchy, colonialism, anthropology, psychoanalysis” (41)), and affected populations. The calls to pluralize and historicize the otherwise monolithically conceived gaze have also extended to what could be called the broader social locations of visuality. Concepts such as “perceptual regimes” (Crary 1998),“scopic regimes” (Jay 1988) and “intercultural optical spaces” (Taussig 1993) have been proposed to contextualize the social inscription of the visual. In the Latin American context, Deborah Poole, for example, has proposed the term “image-world” in order to explore the social circulation and importance of images in the naturalization of race or, 148

Coloniality and cinema

in her words, “how is it that ‘race’ came to be seen at all … since both the seemingly individual act of seeing and the more obvious act of representing occur in historically specific networks of social relations?” (Poole 1997, 7). Following Poole it is possible to ask, for example, what may have been the role of cinema, both as a social activity and as a field of representation, in the social construction of political and cultural hegemonies connected to the life of coloniality in the continent? But in order to begin answering the question I need, first, to explain what the concept of coloniality itself means.

Coloniality In 1992, writing with Immanuel Wallerstein, Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano defined coloniality as the productive structure of power resulting from the establishment of a hierarchically organized interstate system (Quijano and Wallerstein 1992, 550). Along with ethnicity, racism, and the newness of the modern, coloniality defined “americanity” which is the ideological underpinnings of the modern world capitalist system. Coloniality established both the identity of the colonizer subjects (Europeans) and that of the colonized (the non-European other); the latter were deemed objects of political, economic and cultural exploitation. In another 1992 essay, translated into English in 2007, Quijano stated: “Coloniality… is still the most general form of domination in the world today” (Quijano 2007, 170). Coloniality, or what Quijano sometimes calls the coloniality of power to refer to its capacity to regulate and produce intersubjective identifications in both the Americas and Europe of long-lasting historical consequences, created the modern world system. In 2000, Quijano systematized and clarified his ideas on coloniality: the colonization of America and the emergence of modern European capitalism are deeply intertwined phenomena, so that the new structure of world power is inextricably colonial and modern at the same time. While capitalism as a social relation predates the colonization of America, it is only then and there structured as a world totalizing system for the articulation of labor and difference. It depends on the social classification of world populations according to a colonial understanding of race. The objective of such classification is the control of production processes in the areas of labor, knowledge and subjectivity. The ideology, or what Quijano calls “the specific rationality” of such a system, is “Eurocentrism.” In the area of labor, Eurocentrism uses race as the basic technology of modern/colonial capitalism for the determination of labor identities: whites are entitled to a salary for their work; others can be exploited in non-monetized relations (forced labor, slavery). Both forms of labor are essential for the development of modern capitalism. Such racial division of labor is accompanied by the production or invention of the others of Europe, through knowledge and cultural processes. At the epistemological level, Eurocentrism manifests as a form of Cartesian rationalism that separates soul (mind) and body (nature) as the subject and object of knowledge and then extrapolates the latter distinction to the social field. In this way, Europeans are deemed subjects of reason while non-Europeans are understood as subjects of nature or bodies to be exploited. The final touch is provided by a Eurocentric historical temporality of humanity based on evolutionary and dualistic ideas. According to these, Europe becomes the site and the time of the civilized and thus contemporary, while others are relegated to the past and the primitive (even if coexisting with contemporary Europeans). Finally, at the cultural and intersubjective level, Eurocentrism manifests, first, as the construction of the alleged superiority of the European and the erasure of the history, thought, and cultures of others under the colonizing and civilizing processes lead by Europeans; and second, as the imposition, policing, and inculcation of a subjugated and conflicted interiority for the colonized. Nation-states in the 149

Juan Poblete

Americas inherited this three-pronged Eurocentric structure that combined labor, knowledge and subjectivity. Their efforts to produce nationally homogeneous populations were always limited by the basic paradox of being simultaneously independent states and colonial societies, which were based on the social exclusion and labor exploitation of people of color in non-salaried relations to the benefit of the new national white criollos.This, in turn, limited the possibilities of economic industrial development and democratic organization. Given that in Latin America social classes are still today (differentially) colored, from white to indigenous, with the corresponding forms of social organization of labor, knowledge and subjectivities, Walter Mignolo and the group of scholars behind what is known as the Latin American Modernity/ Coloniality Research Program speak of the need for decoloniality, a process of social, cultural, epistemological, and ethical emancipation based on a delinking from the rhetoric of modernity and the logic of coloniality (Mignolo and Escobar 2013).1 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam in their pioneering 1994 book had called for Unthinking Eurocentrism since it “sanitizes Western history while patronizing and even demonizing the non-West” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 3). There are at least two important ways in which this critique of colonialism and the corresponding decolonial program have manifested in the history of Latin American cinema: the indigenous effort to Indianize film and the efforts of revolutionary filmmakers to rethink Eurocentric national cultures and dependency, and with them, national cinema .

Indianizing film What, then, may have been the role of cinema in the production and reproduction of coloniality in the continent? Moreover, to return to the work of Deborah Poole, what if any “subaltern regimes” of visuality may cinema have generated in Latin America? Once the coloniality of cinema as a system of representations and an apparatus is understood, what else can be done with it if operated by different hands and inserted into different circuits and economies? These are issues that have a long critical tradition. They involve the need to pluralize not only who gets to make cinema but also who gets to see it, and according to what criteria and for what ends; they also include the question of contrasting cinema as a representational discourse, as an industrial institution, and as a social practice at different levels of society, especially at the grass-roots level. While the scope of cinema as an industrial, social and aesthetic lens on the world can be adjusted, zoomed in and out, it is undoubtedly the case that the vast majority of appropriately named dominant cinema has reproduced and involved metropolitan practices, whether these be international or national. According to Faye Ginsburg (2016), during the 1960s and 1970s, the issue for anthropologists of the visual was how the new electronic media (radio, TV, film) were going to affect “primitive people,” while in the eighties and nineties it came to be about how indigenous minorities could actively engage with the production and consumption of this visual diet. Minorities, and especially indigenous peoples have historically faced a number of important issues in this regard: how to react to their representations at the hands of others; whether to engage at all with hegemonic visual practices and techniques that have a built-in naturalized colonial logic of objectification and commodification and often take indigenous subjects as objects of mis/representation; how to produce their own self-representations with those, until recently, expensive technologies and, in what languages; how to judge (consume and value), circulate and preserve that indigenous visual production; and how to determine the appropriate audiences and interpretation protocols for such efforts. Since the invention of mass produced, more portable, hand-held analog and digital technologies of visualization (from the hand-held celluloid camera to the latest smart-phone), however, indigenous people across the world have 150

Coloniality and cinema

progressively gained access to the production, management and, critique of their own self-representations and those made by others. At the beginning of the 1990s, an early moment in this discussion in visual anthropology, Ginsburg spoke of a “Faustian contract” being faced by minorities. This contract involved, on the one hand, “finding new modes for expressing indigenous identity through media” (Ginsburg 1991, 96) and, on the other, using technologies and media practices that may threaten their knowledges and societies. As a possible response to this dilemma, Ginsburg proposed an “embedded aesthetics” in order to de-Westernize the concept: “With embedded aesthetics, the quality of a work is assessed according to its capacity to represent, embody, sustain and even revive or create certain social relations both on and off screen, respecting longstanding protocols appropriate to the group making the work” (Ginsburg 1994, 590). In her book Indianizing Film. Decolonization, the Andes, and the Question of Technology, Freya Schiwy focuses on organizations in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Colombia to study what she calls “The boom in Latin American indigenous media” (Schiwy 2009, 6). More specifically, she pursues the following questions: “How do [indigenous] video makers adapt a technology apparently ‘foreign’ to their cultures for the goal of strengthening them? How significant is the representation and role of women? How do these videos compare to earlier efforts at creating an anticolonial gaze? How do they negotiate the openings and pitfalls of the global market for multicultural film? How might indigenous media contribute to a greater understanding of decolonization…?” (6). For Schiwy these organizations are engaged in an effort to strengthen their indigenous communities by using among others, alternative “modes of knowing and forms of transmitting social memory” (8), i.e., “vindicating indigenous cultures and epistemologies” in order to “turn them into sustainable knowledge” (9). In so doing they: (a) challenge dominant representations of indigenous peoples as allochronous to modernity (primitive, dying, irrelevant, barbaric); (b) open themselves up to a transformation of their own “cultural and epistemic traditions”; and (c) reveal gender and the feminization of certain aspects of culture as both a colonial and an indigenous key and problematic node of power (8–9).2 By Indianizing film, Schiwy refers to “the capacity of indigenous cultures to integrate European elements into their own symbolic and social orders” (13) creating what Raheja calls “visual sovereignty” (quoted in Schiwy, 14). This creative appropriation of film as technology and social practice, reveals a preference for visual rather than written technologies (the latter burdened with a long colonial and hegemonic history) and implies a complex incorporation of European elements and a recreation and prolongation of indigenous cultures. Such appropriation is made possible by both the incorporation of humor and other elements—such as “suspenseful narratives and the stock code of Hollywood film” with “abundant close-ups, elements of the horror movie and the melodrama” (12) and personal, not merely collective, stories—and by indigenous control over the social process of production, distribution and exhibition of film.Thus, film as both a technology of representation and social practice is redefined: “It becomes a technology of knowledge that entertains and educates but also allows for social practices to be strengthened or be brought back into existence” (13–14). Rather than asking the twin questions of whether film as a dominant Western technology could be used by indigenous people to “rescue” their own cultures or ever represent indigenous subjects in a non-colonial way, Schiwy insists that indigenous appropriation of film (including codes for representation and social forms of making and using) uses it to “construct a pan-Indian ethos by assimilating Western thinking and technology” (20). One of the central interventions of indigenous communities’“indianizing film” through their videos is accomplished via their dismantling of what Schiwy calls “the lettered city’s visual economy” (87) and the corresponding colonial gaze, based on a double spatial (virgin territories) 151

Juan Poblete

and temporal (non-contemporaneity) displacement of indigenous others: “Camera eye and narrative construct a colonial gaze that boosts the foundational ambiguity of colonialism: an everpresent pastoral [or nostalgia for and interest in contact with pristine nature] that coexists with a nightmarish fear of otherness” (91). There is in fact a long tradition of mainstream films combining these two elements, the “monstrous” and the “pastoral” or the allochronous and the virginal (28): Emerald Forest (1985), The Mosquito Coast (1986), The Mission (1986), At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1991) to name a few that take place in Latin America, and it is important to consider, following Jean Franco (1993), if a Hollywood film could ever do away with the contradiction between seemingly critical anticolonial positions and a mode of production and representation that betrays those goals? Or to ponder with Ella Shohat and Alison Griffiths (2002) how cinema, having its late nineteenth century origins in both a scientific culture of study, dissection and display and in popular itinerant fairs, is both seemingly objective and entertaining in its use of others as objects of curiosity and exploitation, visual and economic. In “Imaging Terra Incognita.The Disciplinary Gaze of Empire” (1991) Shohat outlines a series of ways, including maps and sexualized images, in which Western culture has imagined the territories of others. For her, cinema has often represented those territories through an ideological arsenal of forms as lost, unknown or hidden and ready for white colonization, while it has also literarily colonized the world as Hollywood.This has been accomplished through many of those films that explore and expand what Shohat and Stam call “the imperial imaginary” and “the tropes of empire” (Shohat and Stam 1994, 100–177).3 This colonial gaze can be reversed by what Robert Stam and Louise Spence (1983) call anticolonial film. Indianizing film is part of this anti-colonial reversal of the gaze. As communities connect through audiovisual means and are increasingly aware of each other, decolonization becomes the construction of inter-indigenous commonality and connection, beyond the colonial homogenization as Indians. There is, to conclude this section, a certain paradox or friction in the idea that film is both a form of colonialism and a tool to overcome it. On the one hand, film is seen as an apparatus and an industrial form of representation and mediation of the real, imposing, structurally, a colonial form on both the represented world and the relations between the spectator and the film text. On the other, film’s collective nature, its ways of using montage and the coexistence of narratives and viewpoints, as well as its now relative low cost of technological entry point and circulation, are seen as both a crucial and more democratically accessible counterpart to the primacy of the letter, the letrados, and the colonial ideological structures associated with them, and a powerful tool to overcome the limits of epistemological and aesthetic colonialism.4

The national critique of cinematic colonialism US film production is such a dominant global player that its cinema is rarely seen as a national cinema, and is instead conceptualized simply as Hollywood, i.e., the big colonizing other of all other national cinemas worldwide. National cinema in Latin America, as elsewhere, has been to a significant degree conceptualized as non-Hollywood or different-from-Hollywood. There is here an important colonial/decolonial history, three of whose moments I would like to mention in the context of this chapter. As part of the interwar effort to neutralize Nazism in the 1930s, the US administration presided by Franklin Delano Roosevelt created the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs within the motion picture section of the State Department. The office attempted to use the power of Hollywood cinema to improve relations with Latin Americans and secure their political loyalty through films such as a Disney trilogy, which includes South of the Border with Disney (1941), Saludos Amigos (1943), and The Three 152

Coloniality and cinema

Caballeros (1945). This trilogy ended up representing, through a particular kind of return of the repressed, the status of what Julianne Burton has called a full-blown “allegory of first world colonialism” (Burton 1994, 146). Burton concludes: “Disney’s gift of intercultural understanding turns out to be the act of packaging Latin America for enhanced North American consumption” (146–147). It was as if Hollywood was bent on showing that, even when it tried hard to avoid being colonial, it could not stop or control itself. In fact, that was the conclusion which many Latin American intellectuals reached in the 1950s and 1960s. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s famous 1969 decolonial manifesto, “Hacia un tercer cine” (Toward a Third Cinema), for example, proposed a new articulation between the artistic medium, its producers and publics, and their political aspirations based on revolutionary premises of radical social transformation rather than on the populist ones of social representation that had linked the golden age classic Brazilian, Mexican and Argentine melodramas and comedies to their respective political regimes in the 1930s–1950s. For Solanas and Getino what needed to be reconceptualized was both the nation—in order to liberate it from its colonial and neocolonial social and economic legacies—and cinema—in order to replace the seductive and colonizing spectacle of Hollywood productions with new ways of presenting the fusion of the sensorial and the intellectual (Poblete 2017).This was the task of Solanas and Getino’s famous trilogy of La hora de los hornos (1968) which they described as “not a spectacle nor a film, but an action.” As in the case of contemporary indigenous visual cultures analyzed by both Ginsburg and Schewy, Solanas and Getino understood that decolonizing film involved a dual effort. Cinema was both a potent mis/representational machine that needed to be countered, and a set of social relations—presided over by the singular creative authority of the director, the economic might of the producer, and the passivity of the spectators—that could be altered to serve the needs and interest of whole communities, from union workers to a truly independent nation. One of the most explicit points in the thesis that Hollywood, and thus cinema itself, has had a historically ethnographic relation with Latin America (López 1993), is reached in the 1978 film Agarrando Pueblo by Colombians Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo. The film follows a director and his crew, hired by a European company to produce images of the reality of life in Colombia, as they stage images of child abandonment, poverty, mental illness, and street peddling for their film. Paying pennies to their real-life actors, the director and his producer make explicit in their actions the full extraction of surplus value that the filming of poverty for alleged denunciation or political purposes has often meant in the history of Latin America’s relation with film. In their accompanying manifesto “¿Qué es la Pornomiseria?” (What is misery porn?) Ospina and Layolo (1978) clearly state the foreign and often exploitative nature of the film gaze in relation to the continent. In Mayolo’s words: “Agarrando pueblo” invites us to reflect on the relationship between those being filmed and those doing the filming, using humor to uncover the exploitation of misery and the potential distortions certain images can generate when they are superficially and paternalistically obtained, turning the people into the OBJECT rather than the SUBJECT of their own destiny. “Agarrando pueblo” invita a la reflexión sobre la relación existente entre filmado y filmador, desentrañando a través del humor la explotación de la miseria y las posibles deformaciones que pueden tomar ciertas imágenes cuando son obtenidas superficial y paternalistamente, convirtiendo al pueblo en OBJETO y no en SUJETO de su propio destino. (Mayolo, n.d., n.p.) 153

Juan Poblete

This implies a clear return of the gaze, whereby the native demands coevalness and agency and learns to open their eyes to take control of the production of images. Such a turn has prompted Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui to call for, and develop, a “sociology of the image” capable of understanding the liberatory potential of images, including film, in Bolivia. For Rivera Cusicanqui such a sociology is part of an effort to overcome the limits of the monological and Eurocentric modernizing or developmentalist perspectives of the social sciences and the colonial overtones of written discourse in the construction of the discourse of the nation in Bolivia (Rivera Cusicanqui 2015).

Coloniality in films As already stated, there are at least three ways to classify actual films in relation to the topic of coloniality and cinema: there is, first, the Hollywood representation of and engagement with Latin America; then the coloniality (and decoloniality) of Latin American film-making and representations of and engagement with the continent’s history; and, third, there are Latin American and Iberian films that directly engage with the long colonial period. In the first group one could list films like the already mentioned Saludos Amigos and Three Caballeros but also 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992) and a long list of American movies and documentaries connected to the Mexican, Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Chilean revolutions, many more taking place in the Amazon or some unspecified Latin American jungle, and numerous situated on the border between the US and Mexico or representing Latina/o struggles in the United States.The second group would include films such as La Hora de los Hornos (1968), La Batalla de Chile (1975–1979), Bolívar soy yo (2002), Camila (1984), La Fiesta del Chivo (2005), La Nación clandestina (1989), El Norte (1983), etc. Finally, the third group includes films about: the colonization of the Hispanic and Luso Americas such as O Descobrimento do Brasil (1936), and major historical figures such as Columbus, Cortés, Cabeza de Vaca, Bartolomé de las Casas, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Lope de Aguirre, Hans Staden; or major historical processes, such as slavery in El Otro Francisco (1974), La última cena (1976), Quilombo (1984), and Xica da Silva (1976).5 I would like to conclude this chapter with an analysis of a few of the films in this third category, along the triple lines suggested by the definition of coloniality: labor, knowledge, and subjectivity.

De/colonizing the labor of film Two important films directly engage with what I called above the paradox of, or the friction between, the idea that film is a colonial weapon perpetuating a colonial gaze and exploitative labor relations, and the idea that film could be a powerful means to overcome the limits of epistemological and aesthetic colonialism. These films are Para recibir el canto de los pájaros (1995) by the famous Bolivian director Jorge Sanjinés, an exponent of the New Latin American Cinema movement, and También la lluvia (Even the Rain) (2010) by Spanish actress, writer and director Icíar Bollaín. Both films share a surprising number of elements in their effort to show—through a metacritical commentary on representation, exploitation, and racism in film and in the film industry—how film is connected to coloniality: from the basic structure (the films we see are about a crew filming a critical movie about the conquest that has difficulties recruiting the natives they need) to the combination and connection of intra and extradiegetic passages, the ideological discussion and contradictions between actors, director, producer, and crew and then between them and the indigenous communities, the deafness of the crew to the ways of living in those communities, the best anti-colonial intentions of a leftist director subverted or affected 154

Coloniality and cinema

by the weight of colonial prejudice, etc.6 In the Sanjinés film, Rodrigo, the director—having drunk too much after the indios comuneros, in order to show their disapproval of the crew’s behavior in the village, besieged the school where the film crew is residing—reproaches Catherine, a French woman who lives in the area, that she is racist and Eurocentric. Catherine’s sin is to think too highly of the ethical standards of the natives and point out to the mestizo Bolivian professional filmmakers their ignorance and racism against their indigenous co-nationals. Pedro, the producer, whose brother, Fernando, has fallen in love with Rosita, one the natives in the ayllu Janco Amayu where the films (both the one we see and the one they are filming) take place, reinforces Catherine’s point by saying that he will “never allow an india in the family.” Sanjinés and the Grupo Ukamau had conceptualized in the book Teoría y práctica de un cine junto al pueblo (1979) “the war” between Hollywood and the decolonial efforts of Latin American filmmakers as a struggle to reach Latin American publics, especially workers and campesinos who—by virtue of their economic situation, political consciousness (workers) or their cultural traditions (campesinos)—were, in the 1970s, both less contaminated by Hollywood and in a stronger position to receive a revolutionary message. Like Solanas and Getino, Sanjinés and his Ukamau colleagues concluded that the key was to make the people participate in their films both as workers and as fully engaged and critical spectators (Sanjinés 1979). También la lluvia/Even the Rain (2010) by Icíar Bollaín, written by Bollaín’s husband and frequent Ken Loach collaborator, Paul Laverty, tells three stories of colonialism and decolonial struggle. In the first, we follow a Spanish production company with a Latin American director trying to do a critical historical film on the conflict between the greed of Columbus and the Spanish greed at the “discovery” point and the defense of the Indians and denunciation of Spanish brutality by the Dominican Antonio de Montesinos 20 years into the conquest. While the conquistadors in the film within the film exploit and torture the Indians, the crew, which is filming this story of tortured Taínos in Bolivia because of the lower costs of labor and production in that country, exploits, with American funding, its native actors and extras (the second colonial story). The third colonial story and temporality is that of the real-life water wars between the people of Cochabamba and a transnational company bent on privatizing all water (even the rain) in the area, a war in which the main indigenous actor (Daniel, in the present/ Hatuey, a Taíno hero in the film within a film) is deeply involved. The colonial and decolonial parallels and crossovers between the three historical temporalities in this film are many and have been explored in a growing critical bibliography.7 For my purposes here it will suffice to say that those points of connection bring us back to the following questions: Who is the real barbarian and what is savagery? Who has the right to tell the story of colonialism in film and is it even possible? What could be a fair representation of the conflicts it engenders? What is a just price for the labor of those in the Third World who make possible the profits of those in the First? The crucial critical point in this film, to my mind, is typically ambiguous. In one reading, the moment in which También la lluvia substitutes the psychological and political transformation of Costa, the film producer, for the conflict indigenous people had and continue to have, more than five hundred years later, with colonizing powers, is the reflection of a decolonial realization that the only honest thing for a European film concentrating on coloniality to do is to focus on the Europeans and their struggles with the legacies of colonialism. In an alternative reading, that same moment could be seen, instead, as the point of highest coloniality of power as the conflicts affecting the indigenous people of Cochabamba today and the Taínos in the conquest are displaced to the background, themselves privatized or individualized in the ethico-psychological conflict of Costa, who, suddenly turned into the main protagonist, will occupy most of what is left of the film. Regardless, it is important for my argument here that, in addition to the 155

Juan Poblete

structural and thematic similarities already mentioned, both films share a redemptive story of conversion and bridge-building between colonizers and colonized: in the case of the Sanjinés film it is Fernando who falls in love with Rosita, while in Bollaín’s film it is Costa who experiences a change of heart after getting to know Daniel and the natives. A particularly interesting twist on the film about the filming of a film on coloniality and its history is Pirinop: Meu primeiro contato by Ikpeng indigenous directors Mary Correa, Kumaré Txicão, and Karané Txicão (2007). The film, which is part of the broader project Video nas Aldeias, tells the real-life story of the 1964 arrival to the Ilkeng community in the Amazon of two anthropologists, the Villas-Boas brothers, working for the Brazilian government, the later displacement of the Ilkeng to a reservation in the Xingú park, and their current efforts to return to their native land. As Claudia Ferman (2011) aptly summarizes, “[t]he Film tells the story of this ‘first encounter’ of the community with the whites of the Brazilian nation, in multiple voices: the film documentation that exists of this encounter, the testimony of those who lived through that intervention, who are interviewed and share their memories, the dramatic recreation within the community that some of the testimoniantes make of their memories, and the voice of the filmmakers” (141–142). Re-creating that 1964 encounter, the indigenous testimoniantes reproduced what they thought at the time of first contact: “They yelled: He is sucking our souls. That meant we were all going to die. It seemed like a war. Everybody was shouting up and down.” (“Ellos gritaban: él está chupando nuestra alma. Eso significaba que todos ibamos a morir. Parecía una guerra. Todo el mundo gritaba y lloraba para arriba y para abajo.”) When after decades the Ikpeng decide to reclaim their lands, they are divided as to what is the best strategy: let the Brazilian justice system of white men take care of the problem or actively occupy their lands fighting the fazendeiros and other commercial interests? While the airplanes replace here the carabelas, and white Brazilians the Spaniards, some of their civilizing scripts are similar in their coloniality, as are the results: the indigenous peoples are concentrated in reservations and they must fight to reclaim their ancestral territories against the interests of gold diggers, miners, and fazendeiros, while dealing with the mediation and intervention of the Brazilian state and its indigenous-oriented institutions.What makes this film particularly outstanding in our context is that—in addition to its native directors, its palimpsestic tempo-spatial structure, the multiplication of viewpoints (indigenous/white; intergenerational indigenous, inter-indigenous) and times (before 1964, after it, contemporary)—it preserves the complexity of the history and contemporaneity of a colonial situation faced and experienced, in different ways by different peoples.8

Knowledge and subjectivity: the colonization of the imaginary Two films that directly engage with what Serge Gruzinski has called “the colonization of the imaginary” are Gabriel Retes’ Nuevo Mundo (1978) (New World) and Salvador Carrasco’s La otra conquista (1998) (The Other Conquest). For Gruzinski, this colonizing process centrally involved images in a dual development: the Christianization of the imaginary and the indianization of the Christian supernatural, both affecting, to different degrees, indigenous peoples and European colonizers.While, at least originally, this is not so much an invention as “the manipulation, at the same time deliberate and unconscious” (Gruzinski 1993, 194) of forms of Spanish and Indian piety, this dual process would eventually be instrumentalized by the Church, (which at first was not of one mind about the issue) in a full baroque evangelizing pedagogy. As Gruzinski puts it, the problem for the evangelizing effort was not only the inculcation of the images and the code to interpret them but also the transformation of a subjective experience of the sacred. The later 156

Coloniality and cinema

instrumentalizing process involved, centrally, the creation and promotion of syncretic images of the Virgin Mary around a series of alleged apparitions and miracles.The result was the proliferation of the protonationalist cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe. But before such a process could unfold, the conquistadors and their religious intellectual companions felt the need to impose their own patterns of interpretation over the (religious) images and things of the indigenous peoples of what became America, turning them from strange and exotic objects to pagan idolatries, a form of organized idoloclastia which became part of a broader war of images accompanying and legitimizing the conquering strategies of Hernán Cortés (Gruzinski 2001). Gabriel Retes’ Nuevo Mundo precisely tells the story of the subjugation—at first openly violent and then ideological—of the indigenous people of New Spain in the sixteenth century, first by a campaign to eliminate all forms of so-called idolatry and then, to impose the Catholic worldview. More specifically, in the film the Church hierarchy—faced with an imminent indigenous uprising, itself the result of labor exploitation and the so-called campaign against idolatries—decides, through one of the main characters, fray Pedro Francisco de Cañas, to intervene in a more culturally astute way. The idea is to create an image of a native looking virgin painted by a native artist to whom the Virgin should appear, and present that image (and the accompanying vision) to the indigenous masses as the proof of a miracle, calling for racial and cultural mixing and peaceful coexistence. The film begins with a conversation between fray Pedro Francisco de Cañas and a Las Casaslike figure, an encomendero who has come to understand colonialism. In their dialogue, an alternative form of coexistence of beliefs and practices is suggested. The encomendero states: “They don’t like us and they are right. We have deprived them of all their possessions and all their beliefs.” Fray Pedro replies: “I am here to turn them into loyal believers in our sacred mother church.” “And to help turn them into slaves,” adds the encomendero before concluding: “Tell me Don Pedro, why not ally ourselves with them? Instead of dominating them, why don’t we accept their idols? In the end, the faith is the same.” Needless to say, this is not how the story unfolds. Salvador Carrasco’s La otra conquista (1998) is in many ways—its concentration on the suppression of indigenous beliefs and rites; the active inculcation of a new form of subjectivity that gives some, power over the souls of others, and the effort at domesticating the mind through the suppression and cultivation of images—a companion piece to Nuevo Mundo. Unlike the latter though, Carrasco’s film will include detailed renderings of that which was under attack and eventually replaced—the image-based records of historical memory in the Nahuatl codices and the forms of exalted states and visions that, as a sphere, constituted a relative point of commonality between pre-Hispanic and colonial religious practices. The film begins with a long take in which Topiltzin, a tlacuilo, paints in loving detail the scene of destruction that the Spanish war on the rites and images of others has left around Tenochtitlan. Since contemporary Latin American spectators rarely if ever get to see filmic images of an indigenous intellectual keeping a record of the suffering and experience of their people, we understand both its novelty and, at almost exactly the same time, how successful the expansive war of colonialism, supported by the war on and of images, has been since the sixteenth century. The tlacuilo, who is said to be a son of Moctezuma and escapes twice from the Spanish colonizers, is brutally tortured and seemingly converted to Christianity, aspiring to a religious life. But his “converted” life hides a much more complicated picture in which, as Gruzinski would say, the hybridization of native and Christian states of the soul and the body takes command of the screen and the film. From that moment on the dialectical relation between the veneration of Tonintzin and the Virgin Mary stages the unresolved conflicts in Topiltzin’s mind until his ecstatic death.9 His own spirituality, animated by ecstatic pre-Columbian rituality and by 157

Juan Poblete

Christian evangelizing pedagogy, becomes a surface that registers the tensions between these two unequally situated world views and their way of giving meaning to visions and deliria. Coloniality is here shown to be a corrosive and even lethal space for the mind and the spirit.

Knowledge and subjectivity: the indianization of the conquistadors The Christianization of indigenous people had its counterpart in the relative indianization of Spaniards.The gradual transformation of Costa in También la lluvia is one film example of this as are, in more complex ways, the disoriented Don Diego de Zama in Lucrecia Martel’s Zama (2017) and Santiago, the Dominican priest at the center of Luis Alberto Lamata’s Jericó (1990). Additionally, the process is well represented in a series of films, including Cautiverio feliz (Cristián Sánchez, 1998) and Cabeza de Vaca (Nicolás Echevarría, 1990) narrating not the indigenous perspective but that of the colonizer in deep contact with Amerindian cultures and his change, from colonizing conquistador to different degrees of respectful engagement and reciprocity. As captivity narratives these films, and the historical written sources behind them, oscillate between the full and final allegiance to the colonial imaginary to which they both succumb, and the moments of intercultural opening or ambivalence generated by the deep and intimate witnessing of the culture of the other.10 Cabeza de Vaca (1990) by Nicolás Echevarría, based on the book Naufragios by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1542), tells the story of this Spanish conquistador who, upon embarking along with 600 more men in Pánfilo de Narvaez’ expedition, ended up shipwrecking twice in Florida and the Mississippi delta. He lived for eight years among the Native Americans of what is now Texas until his return to a Spanish outpost in Culiacan in 1536, and eventually to Mexico City and Madrid. As the book on which the script by Echevarría, Guilllermo Sheridan and others is based, the film is one of the more vivid and realized illustrations of what, with Beatriz Pastor (2008), we could call the crisis of Spanish imperial reason.The explorer of noble origins, Cabeza de Vaca, undergoes a radical process of dispossession that begins when his Captain yells from one of the makeshift barges they have built to try to sail back to Mexico: “Spain ends here. It’s every man for himself.” Then, one by one, Cabeza de Vaca loses his companions, his clothes, his weapons, until he is captured by a series of native owners who place him in a cage and mistreat him. Instead of the riches and gold the conquistadors were seeking, Álvar experiences first hand the poverty and the hunger some of these natives go through periodically. At one point, having become the property of what in the film is presented as a powerful native shaman, Álvar slowly begins a process of adaptation and acculturation. This process of re-empowerment will culminate with Álvar himself being recognized as a powerful shaman, capable of praying to higher powers to cure a sick man and resuscitate another, taken for dead. The revenant Álvar, now free, has recovered three of his Spanish companions and become close friends with a young Indian whom he helped free from his enemies. At his point of maximum indigenous acculturation, Álvar stumbles upon the Spaniards and returns to so-called “civilization,” only to see, with utter shame and disgust, how the supposedly Christian soldiers are determined to keep on capturing Indians to enslave them. Cautiverio feliz (1998) by Chilean director Cristián Sánchez is based on the book by the same name written by Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán in 1673 and tells the true captivity story of young Álvaro, a criollo captain who was kept captive by a Mapuche lonco or cacique for seven months in 1629 in the south of what is now Chile. At the beginning of the film, the lonco Maulicán tells young Álvaro: “Maulicán is going to teach you to speak Mapudungun […] Since they say that Mapuches are bad people, you will tell them that is not true.You will realize that is

158

Coloniality and cinema

not the case.” What follows is both an epic film—a sort of bilingual Mapuche/Spanish western full of extremely long establishing shots with very few close-ups—and an ethnographic film full of Mapuche rituals, performed by non-professional Mapuche actors, including rituals of death, agricultural work, welcoming, and even a wedding. Unlike traditional ethnographic films, the Mapuche are here endowed with plenty of voice, but as in ethnographic films, that voice is limited to a certain anthropological concept of culture and what is “ethnographiable.” These rituals allow Álvaro to get to know the people he has only seen as savages before, and, also in this way, the contemporary Chilean spectator, who almost never sees Mapuche culture on screen. The process is also reciprocal as the cacique says: “Álvaro is here with us, we love him like a son […] I also used to hate foreigners, but now, knowing little Alvarito, I learned to love him.” Even though in the film Álvaro is happy among the Mapuches—the lonco has even given him his daughter in marriage as a sign of trust and friendship—he looks forward to being rescued through a prisoner swap, in what was at the time a very porous and active frontier economy of human and commercial exchanges. Through anti- or non-Hollywood decisions—such as nonprofessional actors belonging to the community represented, abundant long shots, no closeups—Sánchez’ film is an alternative effort to present on the screen intercultural dialogue and mutual discovery in a colonial context. In fact, both films in this section could be said to participate in the admiring and thankful spirit shared by Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán (1863) at the start of his Cautiverio feliz: “Of this quality and nature are the Indians, that some people call ungrateful and treacherous.” Those who have gotten to know them know, he goes on, “that their actions and courageous efforts have been justified, since they were produced by our tyrannies, our inhumanities, our greed and our sins” (28). A realization that, however, did not prevent the survivors, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, from continuing to work for the expansion of the Spanish Empire in America for the rest of their lives.

Notes 1 For critiques of the decolonial research program’s nature and gender limits; see Escobar (2007) and Lugones (2007, 2010). 2 While space constraints will prevent me from exploring here gender inequality as a component of coloniality, there is a growing corpus of films dealing with the issue in the colonial period.They include María Luisa Bemberg’s Yo, la peor de todas (1990), Eduardo Rossoff ’s Ave María (1999), Alain Fresnot’s Desmundo (2002), Guel Arraes’ Caramuru: A Invençao do Brasil (2001), and Juan Carlos Mora Cattlet’s Eréndira Ikukinari (2007). 3 On the Latin American tradition of representing indigenous peoples in film; see Black (1995), Stam (1997) and Campos (2017). 4 On decolonial aesthetics; see Gómez and Mignolo (2012). 5 On slavery in Latin American film, see Stam (1997). 6 The shared elements are so many that the press in Bolivia spoke of plagiarism at the time of the opening of Bollain’s film; see Laguna (2019). 7 See, for example, Cilento (2012) and Hulme-Lippert (2016). Cilento makes the interesting point that the real crew of Bollaín’s movie showed their “commitment and sensibility” by providing “support for a local film school, a new water deposit and a bridge, and paid the extras $20 a day” (256, note 7). 8 The perspective of Pirinop can be contrasted with the national Brazilian perspective developed, for the same story but now taking the Villas-Boas brothers as protagonists, in Cao Hamburger’s film Xingú (2011). 9 For an interesting poststructuralist reading of the colonial problematic of the colonizing power of the religious face image in film, see Cabezas (2014). 10 Another interesting example in this regard is the contrast between Nelson Pereira dos Santos’ Como era gostoso o meu frances (1971) and Luiz Alberto Pereira’s Hans Staden (1999).

159

Juan Poblete

Works cited Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2006. Visible Identities. Race, Gender and the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Black, Sylvio. 1995. Yndio do Brasil. Film. Bollaín, Icíar. 2010. También la lluvia. Film. Burton, Julianne. 1994. “‘Surprise Package’: Looking Southward with Disney.” In Disney Discourse. Producing the Magic Kingdom, edited by Eric Smoodin, 131–147. London: Routledge. Cabezas, Oscar Ariel. 2014. “Tecnoindigenismo: efectos de rostro.” In Efectos de imagen. ¿Qué es y qué fue el cine militante?, edited by Elixabete Ansa-Goicoechea and Oscar Ariel Cabezas, 255–289. Santiago: Lom. Campos, Javier. 2017. “Unos pioneros en nada ortodoxos. El cine etnográfico latinoamericano de mediados del siglo XX.” Archivos de la Filmoteca 73: 193–212. Carrasco, Salvador. 1998. La otra conquista, Ado Entertainment, 105 minutes. Film. Carrera, Magali. 2012. Imagining Identity in New Spain: Race, Lineage, and the Colonial Body in Portraiture and Casta Paintings. Austin: University of Texas Press. Cilento, Fabrizio. 2012. “Even the Rain: A Confluence of Cinematic and Historical Temporalities,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies16: 245-258. Columpar, Corinn. 2002. “The Gaze as Theoretical Touchstone.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 30 (1–2): 25–44. Correa, Mary, Kumaré Txicão, and Karané Txicão. 2007. Pirinop: Meu primeiro contato,Video nas Aldeias, 56 minutes, Film. Crary, Jonathan. 1998. “Modernizing Vision.” In Vision and Visuality, edited by Hal Foster, 29–44. Seattle: Bay Press. Echevarría, Nicolás. 1990. Cabeza de Vaca, American Playhouse, 111 minutes. Film. Escobar, Arturo. 2007. “Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise. The Latin American Modernity/Coloniality Research Program.” Cultural Studies 21 (2–3): 179–210. Fabian, Johaness. 1983. Time and the Other. How Anbthropology Makes its Object, New York: Columbia University Press. Ferman, Claudia. 2011. “Indígenas, indigenistas e indigeneidad en el cine latinoamericano reciente:Video nas Aldeias, Juan Mora Catlett, Claudia Llosa.” In Cómo se piensa el cine latinoamericano: Aparatos epistemológicos, herramientas, líneas, fugas e intentos, edited by Francisco Montaña Ibañez, 136–157. Bogota: Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Franco, Jean. 1993. “High-Tech Primitivism. The Representation of Tribal Societies in Feature Films” in Mediating Two Worlds. Cinematic Encounters in the Americas, edited by John King, Ana M. López, and Manuel Alvarado, 81–94. London: BFI. Ginsburg, Faye. 1991. “Indigenous Faustian Bargain,” Cultural Anthropology, 6 (1): 92–112. ———. 1994. “Embedded Aesthetics: Creating a Discursive Space for Indigenous Media.” Cultural Anthropology 9 (3): 365–382. ———. 2016. “Indigenous Media from You-Matic.” Sociologia & Antropologia, 6 (3): 581–599. Gómez, Pedro Pablo, and Walter Mignolo. 2012. Estéticas decoloniales. Bogotá: Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas. Web. Griffiths, Alison. 2002. Wondrous Difference. Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press. Gruzinski, Serge. 1993. The Conquest of Mexico. The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World. 16th–18th Centuries. Cambridge: Polity Press. ———. 2001. Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hulme-Lippert, Michelle. 2016. “Negotiating Human Rights in Icíar Bollaín’s También la lluvia,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 25: 1, 105-122. Jay, Martin. 1988. “Scopic Regimes of Modernity.” In Vision and Visuality, edited by Hal Foster, 3–27. Seattle: Bay Press. Katzew, Ilona. 2005. Casta Painting: Images of Race in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. New Haven:Yale University Press. Laguna, Andrés. “También los pájaros: Reflexiones en torno a coincidencias y plagios,” Web, January 15, 2019. http://cinemascine.net/criticas/critica/Tambin-los-pjaros-reflexiones-en-torno-a-coincidencias-y-plagios Levin, David Michael. 1993. “Introduction.” In Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, edited by David Michael Levin, 1–29. Berkeley: University of California Press. López, Ana. 1993. “Are All Latins from Manhattan? Hollywood, Ethnography and Cultural Colonialism.” In Mediating Two Worlds. Cinematic Encounters in the Americas, edited by John King, Ana M. López, and Manuel Alvarado, 67–80. London: BFI.

160

Coloniality and cinema Lugones, María. 2007. “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22 (1): 186–209. ———. 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25 (4): 742–759. Mayolo, Carlos. n.d. “‘Agarrando pueblo’, a note for Oberhausen,” n.p. Web. https://www.luisospina.com/ archivo/grupo-de-cali/agarrando-pueblo/ Mayolo, Carlos, and Luis Ospina. 1978. Agarrando pueblo, Satuple producciones, 28 minutes. Film. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest, London: Routledge. Mignolo,Walter, and Arturo Escobar, eds. 2013. Globalization and the Decolonial Option. London: Routledge. Nuñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, Francisco. 1863. Cautiverio Feliz y razón individual de las guerras dilatadas del reino de Chile, Historiadores de Chile, volume III. Santiago: Imprenta del Ferrocarril. Ospina, Luis, and Carlos Mayolo. 1978. “¿Que es la pornomiseria?.”Text written by Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo for the première of Agarrando pueblo at the Action République cinema in Paris. Web. https:// www.luisospina.com/archivo/grupo-de-cali/agarrando-pueblo/ Pastor, Beatriz. 2008. El segundo descubrimiento. La Conquista de América narrada por sus coetáneos (1492–1589). Barcelona: Edhasa. Poblete, Juan. 2017. “The Concept of National Cinema.” In The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema, edited by Marvin D’Lugo, Ana López, and Laura Podalsky, 17–30. London: Routledge. Poole, Deborah. 1997. Vision, Race, and Modernity. A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. “Colonialidad del poder. Eurocentrismo y América Latina.” In La colonialidad del saber: Eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales, edited by Edgardo Lander, 201–246. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. ———. 2007. “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21 (2–3): 168–178. Quijano, Aníbal, and Immanuel Wallerstein. 1992. “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World System.” International Social Science Journal 134: 549–557. Retes, Gabriel. 1978. Nuevo Mundo. Conacine, 95 minutes. Film. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. 2015. Sociología de la imagen. Miradas Ch’ixi desde la historia andina. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón. Sánchez, Cristián. 1998. Cautiverio feliz, Nómada Producciones, 143 minutes. Film. Sanjinés, Jorge, and Grupo Ukamau. 1979. Teoría y práctica de un cine junto al pueblo. Mexico City: Siglo XXI. ———. 1995. Para recibir el canto de los pájaros, Grupo Ukamau, 97 minutes. Film. Schiwy, Freya. 2009. Indianizing Film. Decolonization, the Andes, and the Question of Technology. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Shohat, Ella. 1991. “Imaging Terra Incognita. The Disciplinary Gaze of Empire.” Public Culture 3 (2): 41–70. Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism. London: Routledge. Stam, Robert. 1997. Tropical Multiculturalism. A Comparative History of Race in Brazilian Cinema and Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stam, Robert and Louise Spence. 1983. “Colonialism, Racism and Representation: An Introduction,” Screen, 24:2, 2-20. Taussig, Michael. 1993. Mimesis and Alterity. A Particular History of the Senses. London: Routledge. Väliaho, Pasi. 2014. Biopolitical Screens: Image, Power, and the Neoliberal Brain, Cambridge: MIT Press.

161

PART II

Knowledge production and networks

9 OLD TESTAMENT, NEW WORLD Diluvialism and the Amerindian origins debate in the Enlightenment Ruth Hill

Introduction José Eusebio Llano Zapata’s mathematical and geological works, which were published in his ­lifetime (Lima, 1721–Cádiz, 1780) and his recently published Memorias histórico, físicas, crítico, apologéticas de la América Meridional, together convey accommodations between religion and the sciences. Although his scientific knowledge (Álvarez Brun 1963; Millones Figueroa n.d. in Llano Zapata 2005b) was ridiculed by the renowned Americanist Antonello Gerbi (1946: 239, n. 1; Katayama Omura 2000), the Peruvian criollo in fact intervened in two interrelated Enlightenment controversies that were pivotal to the place of the New World within Old World histories of nature.The first was the interpretation and/or modeling of the earth’s formation after the Universal Flood, under the rubric of theories of the earth. The second controversy involved the origins of the Indians. On both of these questions, the Peruvian polymath veered from the philological and classical path that had been adopted by many of his predecessors, in order to embrace scientific modernity.

Theory of the earth The Peruvian naturalist never wavered in his adherence to diluvialism, the theoretical model fashioned by a school of theologians and natural historians who examined the role of the biblical Flood in geological, astronomical, and paleontological phenomena of the present—fossilized trees, marine life, mineral deposits, the formation of precious metals, mountains and valleys, even meteorites. These authors fashioned numerous theories of the earth in order to explain the impact of the Flood on the earth of their present.1 A salt lake, located many leagues from the sea, was one of Llano Zapata’s natural proofs of the historicity of Noah’s Flood: I consider it a leftover of the Flood that has remained in our lands like an eternal map of the universal punishment and that makes visible to those who deny what the sacred scripture teaches, the extent of its effects across the entire globe.

165

Ruth Hill

[Lo considero un resto del diluvio que ha quedado en nuestras tierras como padrón eterno del castigo universal y que hace visible a los que niegan contra lo que la Escritura Santa nos enseña, la extension de su efecto a toda la extension del globo terráqueo.] (2005b: vol. 1, art. 14, sec. 1, 308) Llano Zapata argued that precious metals grew in the same way that trees and plants did: “Pues se sabe y se ve que del mismo modo vegetan que los árboles y plantas” (2005b: vol. 1, preliminary article, point 10, p. 151). Silver and gold in Peru had not been exhausted; he credited Antonio de León Pinelo with understanding early on that silver in Peru grew, its veins branching out like a tree.2 By caja, miners meant the wall rock of a vein or deposit—basically, the vein between two cliffs or sections of rock. In an extensive discussion of the mineral kingdom, Llano Zapata cited a manuscript copy of León Pinelo’s Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo to confirm that Veta Rica, the richest of the famed Potosí mountain silver veins, had been uncovered either by Noah’s Flood or by flowing waters over the ages (2005b: vol. 1, art. 1, sec. 15, p. 164). Later in the same article (secs. 27–28), Llano Zapata recalled Antonio de Ulloa’s examination of how precious metals form in the bowels of the earth, and then travel, or branch out (Ulloa 1748, vol. 2, bk. 6, ch. 10, p. 599). The criollo then declined to pursue the matter of placer deposits: Someone who is more interested in the physics of metals that grow outside of cajas (if this can happen), as these portions are, may enter into a subject so fascinating and not useless to examination by the most knowledgeable naturalists. That is, if they are not just pieces broken loose from the mines and cajas of argentite that were cast about those spots since the Universal Flood or other floodwaters from time immemorial. [Otro que se interese más en la física de los metales que se crían fuera de cajas (si esto puede suceder) como son estas porciones, podrá entrar en discusión tan curiosa y no inútil a la indagación de los más sabios naturalistas. Ello, si no son ya pedazos arrancados de las minas y cajas del plomo ronco y ­arrojados a aquellos parajes desde el Diluvio Universal u otras inundaciones inmemoriales.] (2005b: vol. 1, art. 1, secs. 28–29, p. 170) More mines had been discovered in present-day Peru than ever before, he insisted, and their production was astonishing. Indeed, he expected it to rain gold and silver: Over time one can expect that it will rain gold and silver in those lands. The same exhalations that form metals in the bowels of the earth also form them in the ethereal region. During a storm that I experienced while on the peak of Chile’s cordillera many rocks fell. I examined some of them and realized that they embellished their cinder color with some lines of gold. [Con el tiempo se puede esperar que lluevan en aquellos países el oro y la plata. Las mismas exhalaciones que forman los metales en las entrañas de la tierra los forman también en la región etérea. En una tormenta que yo experimenté en el alto de la

166

Old Testament, New World

cordillera de Chile cayeron muchas piedras. Examiné algunas y reconocí que hermoseaban su color ceniciento con unas líneas de oro.] (2005b: vol. 1, “Adiciones,” art. 20, p. 411) The very same thing had occurred in France, in June 1738: “All of which corroborates my observation and inspires the hope that someday metals will rain down in our Indies, since the spirit that engenders them is one and the same whether in the earth or in the air.” [“Lo que confirma mi observación y da esperanza de que algún día lluevan metales en nuestras Indias, pues es uno mismo en el aire y en la tierra el espíritu que los engendra”] (2005b: vol. 1, “Adiciones,” art. 20, p. 411). This was not wishful thinking on Llano Zapata’s part: it was a tenet of eighteenth-century vitalism in physics, mineralogy, and botany. Vitalists reasoned and wrote by recurring to an “analogical hermeneutics” that, as formulated today (Beuchot and Jérez 2016; Beuchot 2016), overlaps with the intellectual foundations of “new realism” (Ferraris 2012) and “new ontological realism” (Gabriel 2012), while it implicitly endorses “ontological fluidity” (Aloi 2018). Contemporary understandings of vitalism vindicate the agency of nonhuman things as part of a broader object-based ontology, or material turn, in the humanities. Philosophers and cultural historians see in this “vital materiality” the opportunity to both break down the ontological distinction between the animate and the inanimate and propel political, environmental, and economic change (see Bennett 2010). For Llano Zapata and his like-minded contemporaries, the growth of precious metals was more than a metaphor. He invoked modern chemists and other authors who had posited the continuous replenishment of minerals, including precious metals.3 For twenty-first-century philosophers, the ordering or disordering of organic bodies into three (artificial) natural kingdoms are not only effects or endpoints, but agency or doing.Within such ensembles/ensemblings, one object’s movement or erasure impacts others within the group (DeLanda 2016). Llano Zapata shared the analogical hermeneutics of many Enlightenment vitalists who reasoned that minerals grew like vegetables and who challenged the lines drawn around the assemblages presented as natural kingdoms (Gibson 2015). Spain commands our attention here because it was one of the nodes in a network of vitalism that covered Western Europe and parts of the Americas. The famed Spanish cultural critic and defender of criollo authors, Benito Jerónimo Feijoo y Montenegro, was a correspondent of Llano Zapata’s who critiqued a plethora of scientific theories on the growth of minerals and metals in “Solución del gran problema histórico sobre la población de la América y revoluciones del Orbe terráqueo” (1733). The essay’s title put front and center the science conjoining theories of the earth—theories of geological origins and time—and theories of Amerindian origins. True, v­ egetation was perhaps not the appropriate term for the growth processes of rocks and mountains. But, Feijoo insisted, numerous experiments suggested that minerals did, in fact, grow like plants or trees.That might explain the origins of the first peoples in the Americas and how the New World had been populated: in remote ages, before the Universal Flood, the continents were connected by rocks or mountains (1733: sec. XVI, art. 47). Feijoo cited eighteenth-century French, Italian, and German chemists, botanists, and medical doctors who would find their way into Llano Zapata’s Memorias. Furthermore, the Spanish royal physician and logician Andrés Piquer (1711–1772) cited Feijoo y Montenegro’s 1733 essay in his own natural sciences textbook, which was used in universities (1745: treat. 4, prop. 87, sec. 322, p. 326). Piquer also affirmed the growth of minerals and metals (1745: treat. 5, prop. 111, secs. 404–405, pp. 408–409).

167

Ruth Hill

Vitalism, then, was not passé in Llano Zapata’s eighteenth century; indeed, it seems startingly fresh today when interpreted through the critical lens of vital materiality, or “vibrant matter” (Bennett 2010). Vitalists shared an understanding of material agency which assumed that objects had lives of their own that were not dependent on the human subject. Objects were not brought into existence by language. They existed—in the case of silver and gold, they grew across or beneath the earth’s surface—as real objects, whether a human subject had knowledge of them or not. Another mention of the Universal Flood in Memorias takes us deep into the earth’s surface to grasp the conjoined nature of theories of the earth and theories of Amerindian origins. Llano Zapata discusses unexplored caverns mentioned in León Pinelo’s manuscript, then remarks: It is presumed that these underground caves were fashioned in times preceding the Indians. Mr. Pinelo was of this opinion, with which I agree, saying thus:“there are these and countless others in that continent, of which many, if not all, give the indication that they were built before Indians went there to settle and consequently before the Flood.” [Se presume que en tiempos antecedentes a los indios se labraron estas bóvedas subterráneas. De esta opinión a que me conformo es el señor Pinelo que dice así: “éstas y otras infinitas hay en aquel continente, que si no todas, muchas de ellas hacen indicio de haberse labrado antes que los indios entrasen a poblar y por consiguiente antes del diluvio.] (2005b: vol. 1, art. 18, sec. 8, p. 363; see León Pinelo 1943: vol. 1, 229) A rich pageant of diluvial theses issued from top-tier thinkers during the Enlightenment; some were controversial.4 An unidentified source for Llano Zapata’s diluvialism was the English naturalist John Woodward (1665–1728), who published An Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth and Terrestrial Bodies, Especially Minerals, as Also of the Seas, Rivers, and Springs, with an Account of the Universal Flood and of the Effects that It Had upon the Earth (1695; rev. 1702, 1723, 1726). Llano Zapata could have found Woodward in Andrés González de Barcia’s 1729 edition of Gregorio de García’s Orígenes de los indios, which is cited in Memorias. González de Barcia (1673–1743) was a co-founder of the Real Academia de la Lengua under the Spanish Bourbon Philip V, and his editions of colonial chronicles circulated widely. Still, it is clear that Llano Zapata knew Woodward’s theory of the earth firsthand, for he omitted Woodward’s name and cited his Essay toward a Natural History by abbreviating its title in French, Géographie Physique ou Essay sur l’Histoire Naturelle (1735). Woodward’s theory of the earth respected the Genesis account of Noah’s Flood and at the same time offered modern scientific explanations for geological phenomena such as the nature of the earth’s surface. Notably, Piquer had lauded Woodward in his manual of the natural sciences (1745: ch. 12, prop. 85, secs. 316–317, pp. 319–321). Another key diluvialist in Memorias was “el ilustrísimo Huet” (“the most illustrious Huet”), that is, Bishop Pierre Daniel Huet (1630–1721), author of an influential treatise on the location of paradise (Hill 2000) in which he discussed the Flood and Noah’s Ark at length. The French bishop argued in Histoire du commerce et de la navigation des anciens (1716) that the Flood was universal, not local: humans over the entire surface of the earth, except those in Noah’s Ark, were exterminated (Huet 1716: 7–8). This second treatise, as shown later in this essay, also came to anchor Llano Zapata’s theory of Amerindian origins. Several diluvialists cited in Memorias were Copernicans, which likely contributed to royal censor and mathematician Jorge Juan’s refusal to approve Memorias for publication. Among the 168

Old Testament, New World

Copernicans often cited by Llano Zapata (and by Piquer) was the French Jesuit Noël Regnault (1683–1762), author of the much-praised Entretiens physiques, ou Physique nouvelle en dialogues (1729; 7th rev. ed., 1745–1750). Like the Peruvian, Regnault avoided naming Woodward, and, instead, referred to the French translation as “Géograph. Phys” (1745–1750: 267, note a). Regnault availed himself of Woodward’s authority to defend the historicity of the Noachian Flood. The Flood took animal life from one dry land and transported it to another; likewise, marine life was carried from the bottom of the seas to other countries, and shells came to be deposited inside the earth and on mountaintops (1745–1750: 267–268). Paul Alexandre Dulard (1696–1760) was another French Copernican cited in Memorias. He versified his theory of the earth and world system: Le grandeur de Dieu dans les merveilles de la Nature (1748) was republished a dozen times into the nineteenth century.5 In his second canto, Dulard defended the historicity of the Universal Flood, recounting how torrential waters from the great abyss came crashing out, surrounding sea levels rose, and tidal waves formed. Water covered fields, mountains, the entire surface of the earth. Le grandeur de Dieu integrated the most prominent theorists of the earth mentioned by Llano Zapata: Isaac Newton, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, Noël Antoine Pluche, Louis Bourguet, the Comte de Buffon, Edmond Halley, and René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur. Finally, the Peruvian naturalist admired Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo (1663–1743). In his writings on the 1746 earthquake in Lima (Llano Zapata 1747) as well as in Memorias (Llano Zapata 2005b), there appeared strands of his fellow criollo’s theory of the earth as set down in the epic poem, Lima fundada, o la Conquista del Perú ([1732] 2017). Moreover, in his outline of the Viceroyalty of Peru’s history, he would resort to Copernican astronomers whose names and tenets he had read in Peralta Barnuevo’s epic and almanacs (Llano Zapata 2005a: 218–221; Hill forthcoming). True, León Pinelo’s manuscript of El Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo informed countless observations about animals, minerals, and vegetables found in Memorias.6 Llano Zapata integrated León Pinelo’s firsthand knowledge of nature, after verifying it through empirical observation (Ewalt 2018). Through new-materialist and new-realist lenses, we see that Llano Zapata deterritorialized or removed non-human objects that had belonged to León Pinelo’s assemblages of New World nature and reterritorialized them within his own. Morevoer, in sharp contrast to León Pinelo’s Late Scholastic thought, Llano Zapata’s scientific readings and methodology were overwhelmingly of the Enlightenment persuasion. My assertion requires a brief but productive excursion into the metahistories of science and knowledge-production that inform my engagement with Memorias and, more broadly, relate to how we tell the history of scientific knowledgeeconomies in the Spanish Atlantic and beyond it. Over the last three decades, several historians of culture and of science have cast light on the ways in which institutionalized scientific modernity, rooted in high theory and Cartesian rationality, territorializes itself and deterritorializes alternate—usually practical, non-discursive—epistemologies (Latour 1993; DeLanda 2016). These scholars have revived the critical distinction between ­knowing-that and knowing-how, which had arisen decades earlier within the field of philosophy (see Ryle 2009) to contest early twentieth-century critical histories of scientific modernity and Western rationality. A similar distinction is vindicated by contemporary historians for whom mental models—in which, I stress, the imagination is not walled off from human cognition—are crucial to knowledge-production. On their reading, mental models mediate the experiential, or knowledgehow, and the conceptual, or knowledge-that. Paradigm shifts, or “revolutions,” that structure previous critical histories of science (most notably, Kuhn 1962) in fact truncate the agents and networks of knowledge-production and knowledge-transfer (Renn 2018). Needless to say, such “revolutionary” perspectives also pass over material, non-human agency. 169

Ruth Hill

Gerbi’s ridicule of Llano Zapata’s role in transatlantic knowledge-production originated within a philosophy of science that did not and cannot make a space for reciprocal relationships between local, everday knowledge—rooted in an analogical hermeneutics (Atran and Medin 2008; Beuchot 2016; Beuchot and Jérez 2016)—and ostensibly universal, discursive knowledge. In Llano Zapata’s always unfinished notes and observations, I see the inductive reasoning associated with Francis Bacon’s concept of histories of nature (Ewalt 2018) working in tandem with the deductive reasoning heralded by Cartesian rationality. This critical insight prepares us to appreciate in Memorias the analogical hermeneutics that I have already mentioned. Llano Zapata’s mental models allowed him to incorporate or reconfigure material objects, to reimagine the relationships between them, and between them and him/us. In brief, he reassembled his own assemblages of nature as he culled new data from nature to verify or debunk prevailing theories.

Critique of theories of Amerindian origins On theories of Amerindian origins, Llano Zapata also distanced himself from León Pinelo. He rejected the guiding premise of El Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo: the American continent—Eden, or the earthly paradise—was inhabited by Adam and Eve and their descendants up to Noah who would build his Ark there and be carried across the seas to Siberia during the course of the Universal Flood. Llano Zapata rejected this scenario as he refuted León Pinelo’s contention that the New World plantain was the tree of knowledge, or of good and evil (León Pinelo 1943: “Árbol de la culpa en las Indias,” pp. 204–207): Assuming, then, that the malus and the ficus of sacred scripture are the same tree as the plantain, or ficus indica, one finds that without altering the version in our Vulgate, this has every indication of having been the tree of good and evil [...]. And since our plantain bears no relation to the latter other than in the width of its leaves, and they are dissimilar in fruits and trunks, it should absolutely not be considered the tree of knowledge that Moses tells us about and that mister Pinelo aspires to situate in our regions [...]. [Supuesto, pues, que el malus y [el] ficus de la Sagrada Historia son el mismo árbol, que el plátano o ficus índica, se halla que sin alterar la version de nuestra Vulgata, tiene esta todas las apariencias de haber sido el árbol del bien y del mal […]. Y no teniendo nuestro plátano otra relación con éste, que lo ancho de las hojas y de ser muy desemejante en frutos y troncos, de ningún modo se debe mirar como el árbol de la ciencia, que nos refiere Moisés y pretende colocar el señor Pinelo en nuestras regiones […].] (Llano Zapata 2005b: vol. 2, art. 62, p. 458) Again, in a 1758 letter to the Spanish humanist Gregorio de Mayans y Siscar, Llano Zapata was characteristically curt in his dismissal of the Late Scholastic historian: All told, I cannot but confess that this wise man became hasty many times in hopes of justifying his Paradise in the New World system, which, not exceeding the limits of some vain conjectures, has stayed within the limits of a simple paradox, albeit a sound one if his reasons are examined. What happened to him was what happens to poets, who tend to go off a cliff chasing the power of a consonant, or what happens to Greek grammarians, who get themselves all in a tangle or maze of expressions.

170

Old Testament, New World

[Con todo, no puedo menos que confesar que este sabio hombre se precipitó muchas veces por querer probar su sistema del Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo que no pasando los términos de unas vanas conjeturas, se ha quedado en los límites de una mera paradoja, bien que fundada, si se contemplan sus razones. Le sucedió lo que a los poetas, que suelen despeñarse por hallar la fuerza de una consonante, o lo que a los gramáticos griegos que por encontrar la raíz de una voz se meten en un enredo o laberinto de expresiones.] (Llano Zapata 2005b: “Carta,” p. 562) Llano Zapata turned to a dear friend of León Pinelo’s, the Augustinian friar and criollo Antonio de la Calancha (1584–1654), to strike down another theory of Amerindian origins: the Canaanite thesis. While recalling Pedro Simón’s report that Spanish miners had dug out of the mountains surrounding Port Callao a ship whose structure differed from that of modern vessels, Llano Zapata turned to Calancha’s Crónica moralizada (1639): His whole scheme with this false report was to prove that there were men in our lands before the Flood. Maestro Calancha cleverly answers him with the following words: “Three things he left unattended: first, whether or not there was a ship other than the Ark during the Flood, and [second,] whether there are mines at Port Callao, and [third,] if there were mines when the Spaniards arrived there. But even if all of this (which had not a bit of truth to it) were proven, it would not prove the antiquity of men, but, instead, the antiquity of the ship.” This report is like the many chimeras that are swallowed by writers who are lovers of novelties.They dress up everything however it suits them to make their whim or willfulness seem consistent. [Toda su idea con esta falsa noticia era probar que en nuestras tierras hubo hombres antes del diluvio. El maestro Calancha le repone con gracia las siguientes palabras:“Tres cosas le faltaron por averiguar, primero si hubo en el diluvio más navío que la arca y si en el Callao hay minas o las hubo cuando entraron los españoles. Pero ni probado esto (que ni asomo tuvo de verdad) no probaba antigüedad de hombres, sino antigüedad de navío.” Esta noticia es como las muchas quimeras que tragan los escritores amantes de novedades. A todo envisten como les sirva de apoyo para hacer consistir su capricho o voluntariedad.] (Llano Zapata 2005b: vol. 1, art. 20, sec. 28, p. 410) The foregoing quote from Calancha was the opening salvo of the Augustinian’s assault on purveyors of the Canaanite thesis. Calancha ticks off “los absurdos de su congetura” (“the absurdities of their conjecture”) here: Let the first be that God commanded that Ham’s descendants from Canaan’s line serve Sem’s descendants, the Jews, and not other peoples. And if they pretend that the curse be fulfilled with these Indians, let them get the nobility [comprised] of so many lords, gentry, and purebloods to agree that they are Jews since Indians serve them, or agree among themselves that it is easier for Indians not to be Canaanites. [Sea el primero que Dios mãdò, que los decendientes de Cam por la linea de Canaan sirviessen a los Judios decendientes de Sem, i no a otras naciones; i si en estos Indios

171

Ruth Hill

quieren q se cũpla la maldiciõ, o negocien cõ la nobleza de tantos cavalleros, idalgos i linpios que seã Judios pues les sirvẽ los indios, o negocien los escritores consigo, que es mas facil que estos Indios no sean Cananeos.] (Calancha 1639: ch.VI, para. 1, p. 35) Calancha crafts an ironic concessio: he appears to concede the point that Indians descended from Canaanites only to pounce on his adversaries by arguing that, like the cursed Canaan and his progeny, who were slaves of the Israelites in the Promised Land, Indians were slaves of the converso nobility in Lima.The dilemma that he extends to writers who defend the Canaanite theory of Amerindian origins is a forked irony. Recent history weighed heavily on Calancha, a stalwart defender of the moral and intellectual capacity of Indians and a staunch opponent of the elites who mistreated them. He certainly had in mind events leading up to the 1639 auto-da-fe in Lima, during which the Holy Inquisition would punish several noblemen and church officials of Portuguese Jewish extraction (Schaposchnik 2015). Fernando de Montesinos, a Presbyterian historian and miner mentioned in Llano Zapata’s Memorias, published an account of that auto-da-fe (1639) that opens with the theory that the earthly paradise was in Peru, elaborating on it with colonial chroniclers (Columbus, Antonio de Herrera, José Acosta, and others) who would later figure in León Pinelo’s manuscript of Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo.7 Although scholars have speculated that Montesinos was, like León Pinelo, of Portuguese converso ancestry, the account itself (Montesinos 1639) is vehemently anti-Jewish, and its contents shed much-needed light on Calancha’s allegation. Montesinos recounts how Crypto-Jews in Lima vanished from the markets, beginning in 1634, as the Inquisition began its secret investigations and arrests. After reviewing lesser punishments meted out by the Holy Office, he describes those merchants and middlemen whipped, sent to the galleys in Madrid, and/or fined, and then exiled from the Indies for practicing Judaism. The case of Don Simón Ossorio (a.k.a. Simón Rodríguez), a Portuguese raised in Flanders and residing in Quito, illuminates Calancha’s attack on the Canaanite thesis, which Llano Zapata was to carry forward. Ossorio had gone with power-of-attorney to oversee the Duchess de Lerma’s obrajes in Quito. After he was jailed, they found two portraits of him—one dressed as a woman, and the other dressed as a man. During his trial, they uncovered three supposed fathers corresponding to three different nationalities. Ossorio was dodging legal and social infamy: in Coimbra, the Holy Inquisition had publicly condemned and reconciled his biological father with the Church. He had undergone his nobility trial in Madrid, and was so convinced of victory that he bragged about it, stating that: With four reales he would make himself out to be whoever he wanted at the blood purity trial in Madrid, portraying himself as the noblest and most entitled of men, and to exhibit this he wore flowing locks and went about all dressed-up and perfumed, [and] he was jailed and his assets confiscated for being observant of Moses’ Law and teaching it to others [… ]. [Con quatro reales haría él en Madrid en informaciones, y quien quisiesse, pintándose el más noble y más calificado, y para ostentar esto, traía grandes mechones y andaba muy gala y oloroso, fue preso con secreto [sic] de bienes, por Iudio observante de la ley de moysen, y que la enseñava a otros […].] (Montesinos 1639: n.p.) 172

Old Testament, New World

Such notorious events during the gestation of Calancha’s chronicle incited his assault on Lima’s converso nobility, deftly ensconced within his critique of the Canaanite thesis. Within a broader historical frame, moreover, Calancha’s dilemma—as facetious as it was caustic—red-flagged the Jewish heritage of elites at a historical inflection point for the transfer and application of blood purity statutes to the New World (see Hill 2005: ch. 5; Martínez 2008). Whether or not Llano Zapata was aware of the historical backdrop to Calancha’s resentment, he knew that the Canaanite thesis was well-traveled in the seventeenth century and in his own, thanks to Juan de Torquemada, author of Monarquía Indiana, a sprawling chronicle of New Spain first published in 1615 and republished in 1723. In a letter to Mayans y Sicar, Llano Zapata dispensed with Torquemada’s suggestion that José Acosta (whom Llano Zapata cited frequently and with admiration) had stolen most of his Historia natural y moral de las Indias from another author. Torquemada often wrote with passion, not reason, and made unverifiable claims (Llano Zapata 2005b: “Carta,” pp. 564–565). Moreover, Torquemada himself was considered a plagiarist.8 When viewed within a larger historical and material sensibility, Llano Zapata’s rebuke takes on richer hues. In his Proemio to the 1725 edition of Monarquía Indiana, González de Barcia claimed to have declined to restore a passage from the original manuscript that he characterized as “el fundamento, o Clave de la Idea de esta Obra” [“the foundation, or Key to the Work’s Meaning”] (Torquemada 1725: Proemio, n.p.). The so-called “key” to Torquemada’s work, which the editor stated had been suppressed due to recato—perhaps a euphemism for censure—was that the Mexica had traveled to the Promised Land (Canaan), as the Israelites had, according to Exodus, because the Devil wished to imitate God (1725: Proemio, n.p.). González de Barcia supported his interpretation of Torquemada’s true intent by invoking García’s Origen de los Indios (which González de Barcia would revise, expand, and publish in 1729) and Agustín de Vetancurt’s Teatro mexicano (1971).9 All that we have to go on, however, is the editor’s supposition, for Torquemada’s own words situated him within the coterie of the Canaanite thesis. Granted, Torquemada did, in fact, divine common ground between Judaism and Mexica religion. The Mexica people, who succeeded the Toltecs and were the ancestors of modern Indians, observed religious holidays at the start of each month, which custom “appears to have been taken from that of the Hebrews […]” [“parece hurtada de la de los Hebreos […]” (1725: vol. 2, bk. 10, ch. 9, p. 248)]. Morning and evening sacrifices throughout the year mirrored those performed by Hebrews in the Temple (1725: 248). The two peoples shared engagement and marriage customs (1725: vol. 2, bk. 13, ch. 13, pp. 411–412, 416–417, 419), as well as traditions of birthing and childrearing (1725: vol. 2, bk. 13, ch. 26, p. 466). In addition, a screed—allegedly penned by Bartolomé de las Casas—traced the allegedly Hebrew roots of indigenous languages and peoples, which irritated Llano Zapata. He seized on the linguistic argument that the word canoa was derived from the Hebrew canon: “Whoever’s opinion it was, it lacks any foundation whatsoever” [“Sea la opinion de quién se fuese, ella carece de todo fundamento” (Llano Zapata 2005b: “Carta a Mayans y Siscar,” p. 582)]. González de Barcia’s claim notwithstanding, however, Torquemada went to great pains to discredit the Hebrew theory of Amerindian origins in a chapter that clearly caught Llano Zapata’s attention when he was reading the 1725 edition of Monarquía Indiana (Torquemada 1725: 1, bk. 1, ch. 9, pp. 22–27). A closer look at Monarquía Indiana confirms Torquemada’s open-armed commitment to the Canaanite theory. He began his exposition by denouncing figurative interpretations of the giants who migrated into the Land of Canaan, or the Promised Land, and were defeated by the Israelites (1725: 1, bk. 1, ch. 13, p. 34). He then recounted that the original inhabitants of New Spain, the Toltecs, encountered Quinametin (giants, or the biblical Nephilim) when they arrived.10 Those Quinametin 173

Ruth Hill

populated the land, according to native accounts, but nobody knew from whence they had come (1725: 1, bk. 1, ch. 13, pp. 34–35).Torquemada had once owned a giant’s molar— twice as big as a man’s fist—that weighed more than two pounds. At the time, he consulted a Parisian sculptor nearby who told him that he had seen an enormous thigh bone unearthed at the St. Augustine Convent in Mexico City, “which was from a Giant, one of those from the Age of the Flood […]” [“que era de Gigante, de los del Tiempo del Diluvio […]” (1725: 1, bk. 1, ch. 13, p. 35]. Such arguments framed the Toltecs as Canaanites living among the Nephilim.Torquemada did not doubt that the disinterred bones of the Quinametin were those of the biblical Nephilim. He did not know, however, whether those fossils in Mexico City were prediluvian or, rather, postdiluvian (1725: 1, bk. 1, ch. 13, p. 35). On which side of the “Age of the Flood” were these fossils of Mexican Nephilim (Quinametin)? Llano Zapata did not pose this question because he did not believe that bones of enormous proportions discovered in Europe and the Americas were fossils of those colossal human hybrids—the so-called sons of man and God—from the Old Testament. In a 1726 essay, Feijoo had acknowledged the unearthing of scattered bones that made their way to cabinets of curiosities. Almost all savants, he insisted, knew that these bones belonged to elephants or whales or were petrifications of organic matter (Feijoo 1726; Sequeiros San Román 2002, pp. 112–138). Similarly, Llano Zapata considered such discoveries in the New World to be either hoaxes or the remains of large animals from the remote past (2005b, pp. 558–559). Fossils belonged to different material and narrative assemblages: human agents such as Torquemada, Feijoo, and Llano Zapata mentally and manually indexed fossils—which encompassed more organic and non-organic objects than what we associate with the fossil concept today (Rudwick 1976)—in patterns that responded to a vast array of scientific, religious, economic, and imperial demands and desires. Fossils generated human meaning in relationship to each other, and disrupted anthropocentric networks of signification. Not only did Torquemada and other colonial chroniclers collect and index non-human remains, they assembled them within a broader assemblage of supposed material evidence of the first peoples in the Americas. For Torquemada, bones that he had seen or held in his hand were the fossils of race. As vibrant matter, the remains of those supposed giants made explicit for Torquemada the racial origins of the Indians who were living on top of those fossils in seventeenth-century Mexico City. In the second volume of Monarquía Indiana, the author outlined his theory of the Canaanite origins of Indians more deliberately, and from a very different angle. First, he surveyed potential natural causes of skin color in Indians and Africans (Torquemada 1725: 2, bk. 14, ch. 18, pp. 567–568), then he maintained that the actual cause was supernatural: the curse that Noah had placed on his grandson Canaan, more commonly known by the misnomer “Ham’s Curse,” for Noah had punished his son Ham by punishing Canaan. Torquemada did acknowledge an exegesis of Ham’s Curse opposed to his own: the skin color of Black Africans was derived from their ancestor Ham, whose red skin God had blackened to punish Ham for having exposed his father Noah’s private parts to the irrision of his sons, i.e., Noah’s grandsons. Ham’s curse was black skin, according to that exegesis, and all of Ham’s progeny were included in that “justo juyzio de Dios” [“God’s just judgment”] (1725: 2, bk. 14, ch. 19, p. 569). Torquemada partly disagreed, however, and emphasized the biblical mark of Cain. Canaan was the actual culprit, but Ham failed to punish his son’s sacrilege. Consequently, Ham’s four sons were darkened by their father’s complicity in Canaan’s infamy, and Canaan’s offspring were condemned to serve their “brothers,” nearly all of them enslaved and killed by the Israelites (1725: 2, bk. 14, ch. 19, 569). As elaborated in Monarquía Indiana, the combination of the mark of Cain (slavery) and Ham’s curse (dark skin) served to justify the Indians’ servitude and death, or at least that was how it might be interpreted—and was interpreted, at least by the criollo Calancha. In Crónica moralizada, 174

Old Testament, New World

the Augustinian friar razed Torquemada’s second line of argument by noting that there were no grounds to claim that Canaanites were brown. Even if they were, he noted, the color of Indians in Peru varied enormously. Besides, Tartars and Indians in Asia were brown and they were the descendants of Sem and Japheth, not of Ham. Furthermore, Indians were not slaves before the arrival of the Spaniards, nor could they be held in bondage, according to Spanish laws (Calancha 1639: ch. 6, p. 37; MacCormack 1982). Llano Zapata disrupted another venerable school of thought about Amerindian origins, one which had coalesced around the Hebrew theory and was rooted in the biblical Ophir founded by Noah’s son of the same name. Different flavors of the Jewish theory circulated in Llano Zapata’s era. Perhaps the most respected exegete of the Enlightenment was the Frenchman Augustin Calmet (1672–1757).The 1730 edition of his Dictionnaire historique, critique, cronologique, geographique et litteral [English trans. Calmet’s Great Dictionary of the Holy Bible, Historical, Critical, Geographical, 1813] was often cited by Llano Zapata. Calmet provided a formidable review of Ophir theories, at one point noting: “Others have fought for the Country of Ophir, and have placed it in the Island called Hispaniola. Christopher Columbus, who first discovered this Island in 1492, used to say he had found the Ophir of Solomon. […] Postel and some others have placed it in Peru, a country famous for its vast quantity of gold” (Calmet 1813: vol. 2, p. 325). Immediately after quoting from Calancha’s rebuttal of the tale about the ship found in the mountains of Port Callao and of the Canaanite thesis tied to its mast, Llano Zapata discredited the aforementioned Montesinos’s knowledge of minerals as displayed in his Ophir de España: Memorias historiales y políticas del Pirú [Spain’s Ophir: Historical and Political Memoires of Peru] (Llano Zapata 2005b: vol. 1, p. 410, n. 233), of which only the second volume has been published, as Ofir de España: Anales peruanos [Spain’s Ophir: Peruvian Annals] (1650). Chances are quite high that Llano Zapata would also have rejected Montesinos’s thesis that Peru was the biblical Ophir just as he rejected León Pinelo’s manuscript on the New World as the earthly paradise, for both of these authors presented the first peoples in Peru as descendants of Noah, or Hebrews. Llano Zapata’s critique of the Ophir school included Benito Arias Montano, a Spanish theologian at the Council of Trent (later, a diplomat in Spanish Flanders), who still garnered respect from Enlightenment exegetes such as Calmet due to the polyglot Biblia sacra (Holy Bible) that he had co-edited (Antwerp, 1569–1573). Calmet issued unbridled praise for this edition of the Bible: “Nay, some there are who call it one of the Wonders of the World, Orbis miraculum” (1813: vol. 3, p. 291). Calmet and other authors heaped praise on the extensive scholarly apparatus that accompanied Biblia sacra, especially the volume entitled Hebrew Antiquities, the focal point for Calmet (Calmet 1813: vol. 3, p. 291).11 The volume included a treatise on Canaan (Calmet 1813: vol. 3, pp. 326, 367; Gómez Canseco and Fernández López in Arias Montano 2016: p. 50), and it featured stunning maps, doubtless the product of Arias Montano’s friendship with Abraham Ortelius, on whose behalf the theologian interceded with Philip II to secure Ortelius’s appointment as royal cosmographer of Spain. Perhaps the most famous of the maps, then and now, was that which charted the alleged Hebrew migrations to the Americas and elsewhere. In a nutshell, Arias Montano’s hermeneutics consolidated the material riches of the New World—primarily, gold and silver—into a divine reward for the Spaniards who had ostensibly rediscovered the biblical Ophir, where God had ordained that the descendants of Noah’s three sons should reunite through the Spanish conquest of the Americas.12 Additionally,Arias Montano elaborated on the thesis that Hebrews were the first inhabitants of Spain under King Nebuchadnezzar II (sixth century B.C.), which had issued from Jewish, converso, and Christian exegetes and historians (see Gómez Canseco and Fernández López in Arias Montano 2016: pp. 50–54). For obvious reasons, both of Arias Montano’s theses were irreconcilable with limpieza de sangre statutes in the Spanish world (Gómez Canseco and Fernández López in Arias 175

Ruth Hill

Montano 2016: pp. 50–54). They caused enough discomfort to have the Biblia sacra withdrawn from circulation in Spain, and expurgated and restricted elsewhere. Llano Zapata entered the Hebrew theory of Amerindian origins through a backdoor: an article on the lode stone (“De la piedra imán”).With insistently blunt language, he strikes down here the crux of Arias Montano’s theory: Many have reasoned that Solomon’s fleet, which departed from Asiongaber, Port of Idumea, could not have completed such a prolonged voyage by sea without the pilots who directed the fleet being privy to the secret of the nautical stone, which would not have been hidden from that wise King. These [authors] would have it that the term peruain as it is read in Holy Scripture means our Peru.This, if we stick to the strict sense of the Hebrew term and to the corruption of the American term, lacks any foundation whatsoever, no matter how Arias Montano tries to defend it. [Muchos han pensado que la flota de Salomón que salió de Asiongaber, Puerto de Idumea, no podia haber hecho tan dilatado viaje al océano sin ser instruidos los pilotos que la conducían en el secreto de la piedra náutica, que no se ocultaría a aquel sabio Rey. Quieren éstos que la dicción peruain que se lee en la Escritura Santa sea nuestro Perú. Esto, si estamos al riguroso sentido de la voz hebrea y a la corrupción de la americana, carece de todo fundamento, por más que Arias Montano lo defienda.] (2005b: vol. 1, art. 12, point 5, p. 298) The hermeneutical road that connected Perú with the Hebrew parvayim, or perú, had been travelled in both Jewish and Christian exegetical literatures: Arias Montano probably took it from French cosmographer Guillaume Postel, member of a converso family (Gómez Canseco and Fernández López in Arias Montano 2016: 54, n. 47 and n. 48). In García’s Origen de los indios, he devoted book four to Arias Montano’s theory and a patient rebuttal of the same, especially the alleged etymological connection between paruayim and Perú. In the margins, Torquemada’s editor González de Barcia cited Postell, and he repeatedly cited Calmet’s version of the Bible and exegetical works on the same published in the years 1707–1716, including the interpretation and map of the biblical Ophir, which the Frenchman situated far from the Americas. Before turning to Llano Zapata’s theory of Amerindian origins, I wish to underline that he critiqued existing theories of Amerindian origins against the backdrop of significant transformations in knowledge-production. He was writing Memorias when private and royal cabinets of curiosities were being reassembled into museums (Delbourgo 2017; Mauriès 2011) and other scientific institutions. One of Llano Zapata’s aforementioned sources, Ulloa, parlayed his prisoner-of-war experience in England into a scientific opportunity: members of the Royal Academy took him to meet leading naturalists and to visit London’s private collections and nascent museums. In 1752 he founded Spain’s Royal House of Geography and Cabinet of Natural History (Real Casa de la Geografía y Gabinete de Historia Natural), comprised of naturalists and geographers whom Ulloa chose and directed until 1755 (Montero 2003, pp. 21–24; Puig Samper 1995, pp. 114–118; Pelayo 1996, pp. 261–263). Llano Zapata’s theory of the earth upheld the Old Testament account of the Flood, as had Ulloa’s own theory (Ulloa 1748), and both naturalists braided a theory of the earth and a theory of Amerindian origins. Their mental models manifested themselves textually in a georacial architecture: their narratives showcased assemblages of non-human objects (plants, stones, precious minerals, and so forth), put together based on their experiential and theoretical knowledge. They selected and ordered these objects in order to bolster their geological (at that time geographical) and racial edifices (Hill 2019). 176

Old Testament, New World

Llano Zapata’s theory of Amerindian origins Although absent in the critical literature on theories of Amerindian origins (Huddleston 1967; Gliozzi 1977), Llano Zapata’s own theory is laid out in a vast footnote to his article on precious stones and minerals (I, art. 10, n. 119, pp. 238–241). This placement reflected an analogical hermeneutics as well as the ontological conviction that minerals were not dead matter: they could grow, die, and tell stories about the human past and present. Whether Llano Zapata intended it or not, his segue between non-human and human conveys to us a vital materiality that does not, I insist, decenter the human (Bennett 2010; Aloi 2018, pp. 196–197), but does counterbalance human agency. He initially turned to Huet’s widely cited Histoire du commerce et de la navigation des anciens (1716), in which the bishop held that Egyptians and Phoenicians were the only documented long-distance navigators in ancient times. The Phoenicians, ancestors of the Carthaginians (1716: p. 27), demonstrated to the Hebrews, who were masters of the Promised Land (Canaan), the wealth and power of maritime trade, which Solomon needed in order to build the Temple. Phoenicians were especially active on the East coast of Africa, the region known as Ophir in Solomon’s era (1716: pp. 30–31). Huet’s authority and popularity assisted Llano Zapata in establishing that Ophir was not Peru, and that neither Hebrews nor Canaanites settled the New World after the Flood. The French Protestant Samuel Bochart (1599–1667), who argued (1707) that pre-Columbian peoples were descendants of Phoenicians, themselves Canaanites, is acknowledged in Memorias. Still, Llano Zapata copies almost an entire page from Huet to contrast Bochart’s theory (Huet 1716: 67–68; Llano Zapata 2005b: vol. 1, art. 10, n. 119, p. 240). The bishop marshaled ancient authorities to argue that in addition to their Old World colonies, Carthaginians had discovered and inhabited an enormous island in the ocean, Isla Afortunada, distant from the Cádiz Strait. A storm, caused by the strong wind out of the East that is characteristic of the Torrid Zone, carried Carthaginians to western islands. These lands would later be known as América. Next, Llano Zapata summons Le Gendre, marquis de Saint Aubin, for whom the Phoenician theory of Amerindian origins revolved around the Carthaginian admiral Hanno’s lost periplus, or logbook, of his expedition along the entire coast of Africa. Greek and Roman historians claimed that the periplus included voyages to new lands, during which the sun was on Hanno’s right, suggesting that the descendants of the Phoenicians had reached Isla Afortunada, or the islands that would later be called America (Le Gendre and de Saint Aubin 1741: 697–698; Llano Zapata 2005b: 241, n. 119). Llano Zapata took away two points from his reading of Le Gendre, who had read Huet: first, that the lost periplus of admiral Hanno’s voyages was historical; and, second, that Europeans were not the first people to round the Cape of Good Hope (Llano Zapata 2005b: 241, n. 119). The upshot, which Llano Zapata’s readers would have grasped immediately, was that the Phoenicians or their direct descendants made it not only to the Cape of Good Hope but also to Cape Horn, in Tierra del Fuego, nexus of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Just as Pedro Álvarez Cabral came upon the coast of Brazil while sailing along the coast of Malabar, so too “the Phoenicians could have discovered and populated those parts of the world […]” [“pudieron los fenicios haber descubierto y poblado aquellas partes del mundo […]”] (Llano Zapata 2005b: 241, n. 119). Llano Zapata’s ensuing conclusion resolutely illustrates how theories of Amerindian origins intersected theories of the earth: And although it might be argued that this land, or Atlantic Island, did not extend more than 300 leagues beyond the Columns of Hercules, who knows if it formed a continent with our western islands or with Brazil in another age? This is not hard to believe 177

Ruth Hill

when experience makes us see, that on this earthly globe, what before was sea is now land, and land what before was sea. [Y aunque se quiera decir que esta tierra o isla Atlántica no se extendía sino 300 leguas más allá de las columnas de Hercules, quién sabe si fue ella en otro tiempo un continente con nuestras islas occidentales o con el Brasil? Esto sin mucha fuerza se puede creer cuando la experiencia nos hace ver que en este globo terráqueo hoy es mar lo que antes era tierra, y tierra lo que antes era mar.] (Llano Zapata 2005b: 241, n. 119) Llano Zapata’s experiential reading of the earth’s surface had a sterling pedigree. John Ray, esteemed theorist of the earth and member of the Royal Society of London, had made the very same claim with respect to the earth’s immersion sequences (1692; 1713), and Llano Zapata twice mentioned Ray in his Memorias (Llano Zapata 2005b: pp. 464, 469). Although the Peruvian’s geological works from 1747 have been attributed to Late Scholasticism (Peralta Ruiz 2007), he actually espoused a dynamic model of the earth (Llano Zapata 1863: pp. 146–147; Llano Zapata 1747: pp. 6–7), which would become even more so after the publication of Juan and Ulloa’s Relación histórica (1748). Not long after, Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, would publish the tenet “sur le changement de mer en terre & de terre en mer” in support of his own theory of the earth (1750: p. 105).

Conclusion In Llano Zapata’s Memorias, “antiquities,” or material objects from the remote past such as the unexplored caves that I mentioned earlier, warranted his theory about the origins of New World peoples and his theory of Amerindian origins. However, he did not recur to Torquemada’s fossils of race—the alleged bones of New World Nephilim remembered as Quinametin. Llano Zapata was not beholden to Late Scholastic concepts, methodologies, or assemblages of New World nature. Nor was he an intellectual lightweight worthy of Gerbi’s ridicule. The criollo naturalist’s theory of the earth as well as his theory of Amerindian origins relied overwhelmingly on eighteenth-century authors and his own observations of nature in Spain and the Spanish Atlantic. Llano Zapata melded direct observation and Enlightenment authority in defense of diluvialism— and, in a veiled manner, Copernicanism. While doing so, he forged a theory of Amerindian origins that was radically different from the theories of historians and theologians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Notes 1 For a succinct outline of the genre during the long eighteenth century, see Rudwick (2005, pp. 133–139). 2 Modern editors of Memorias were unable to identify Alexandre’s reference guide (1748), which circulated this modern belief. Llano Zapata identifies it as Diccionario botánico. 3 Two chemists whom he frequently cited, Martin Lister and Jan Baptist van Helmont, are likely suspects. See Roos (2007, pp. 77–79). However, so many top-shelf scientists of the 1740s and 1750s appear in Memorias that it is difficult to hazard more than an educated guess. 4 The bibliography on diluvialism is enormous. See Rudwick (1976, pp. 72–93); Rudwick (2010, pp. 73–88); Rappaport (1997, pp. 136–172); Rousseau and Haycock (2000, pp. 135–136); Sequeiros San Román (2002, pp. 36–48); Pelayo (1996, pp. 55–92). 5 Israel (2002) appears to mistake Dulard’s poem (1749) for Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle’s essay on the existence of God (1742).

178

Old Testament, New World 6 The quantitative weight of León Pinelo’s unpublished manuscript of El Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo has been convincingly established by Garrido Aranda (n.d. in Llano Zapata 2005b), who provides not only the percentage of Llano Zapata’s citations of the work vis-à-vis other sources but also numerous examples of the Peruvian’s copying of León Pinelo’s work without attribution. 7 On Montesinos’s Ophir interpretation, see MacCormack (2007, pp. 269–272). Tord (1998, pp. 130– 131) links Montesino’s thesis that the Incas were Hebrews to Montesino’s purported converso origins. See also Hyland (2007); Gordon (2017). 8 It had been suggested that his mentor, Franciscan Jerónimo de Mendieta, had given him the manuscript that Torquemada later published under his own name. See “Carta,” in Llano Zapata (2005b, p. 566). In the revised and corrected edition of Monarquía Indiana (1723) that Llano Zapata consulted, the allegations are confronted. See Torquemada, “Proemio a esta segunda impression de la Monarquía Indiana. El Impresor al Lector” (1723), vol. 1: unnumbered pp. 3–5. See Carlyon’s comments (2005, pp. 37–38) on the Proemio. 9 Llano Zapata consulted the second, 1723 edition, anonymously revised and expanded by González de Barcia. See Carlyon (2005, pp. 118–164). 10 A similar argument was put forth in 1746 by the royal chronicler Lorenzo Benaducci Boturini, whose work (1933) the Peruvian knew (“Carta,” in Llano Zapata, Memorias, p. 563). In Monarquía Indiana, however, the origins theory was more fully developed, as Calancha and Llano Zapata knew well. 11 Kauffmann Doig’s work (1996), unlike the present study, attributes the proliferation of theories of Amerindian origins to the exotic nature of the discovery of America. That the polyglot Bible, with its striking Apparatus sacer of maps and treatises, embodied the genre of geographia sacra is undoubtedly true, as Shalev (2010) has argued. See also art historian Brekka’s recent study (2012). 12 On Postell, Arias Montano, and Acosta, see Gliozzi’s brilliant and unparalleled study (1977). See also Romm (2001, pp. 40–41); Popkin (1989).

Works cited Alexandre, Nicolas. 1748. Dictionnaire botanique et pharmaceutique contenant les principales propriétés des Minéraux, des Végétaux, et des Animaux des Animaux d’Usage. Paris: Didot, Nyon, Dammoneville, and Savoye. Aloi, Giovanni. 2018. Speculative Taxidermy: Natural History, Animal Surfaces, and Art in the Anthropocene. New York: Columbia University Press. Álvarez Brun, Félix. 1963. “José Eusebio de Llano Zapata.” Nueva Corónica 1: 33–101. Arias Montano, Benito. 2016. Antigüedades Hebraicas: Antiquitatum Iudaicarum Libri IX.Tratados exegéticos de la Biblia Regia. Apparatus Sacer. Edited by Luis Gómez Canseco and Sergio Fernández López. Huelva, ES: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Huelva. Atran, Scott, and Douglas Medin. 2008. The Native Mind and the Social Construction of Nature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Beuchot, Mauricio. 2016. Hechos e interpretaciones. Hacia una hermeneutica analógica. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Beuchot, Mauricio, and José Luis Jérez. 2016. Manifesto del nuovo realismo analógico. Milan: Mimesis Edizioni. Bochart, Samuel. 1707. Geographia sacra, seu Phaleg et Canaan. Edited by Pierre de Villemandy. Leiden: Cornelius Boutesteyn and Jordan Luchtmans. Boturini Benaduci, Lorenzo, and Señor de la Torre y de Hono. 1933. Idea de una Nueva Historia General de la América Septentrional, fundada sobre material copioso de Figuras, Symbolos, Caractères, y Geroglificos, Cantares, y Manuscritos de Autores Indios, últimamente descubiertos. Paris: Centre de Documentation “André Thévet.” Brekka, Pamela Merrill. 2012. “The Antwerp Polyglot Bible (1572): Visual Corpus, New World HebrewIndian Map, and the Religious Cross-Currents of Imperial Spain.” PhD diss., University of Florida. Calancha, Antonio de la. 1639. Corónica moralizada del Orden de San Augustín en el Perú con sucessos egemplares vistos en esta Monarquía. Barcelona: Pedro Lacavallería. Calmet, Agustin. 1813. Calmet’s Great Dictionary of the Holy Bible, Historical, Critical, Geographical. Revised and expanded by Charles Taylor. Charlestown, MA: Samuel Etheridge. Carlyon, Jonathan Earl. 2005. Andrés González de Barcia and the Creation of the Colonial Spanish American Library. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. DeLanda, Manuel. 2016. Assemblage Theory (Speculative Realism). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

179

Ruth Hill Delbourgo, James. 2017. Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Dulard, Paul Alexandre. Le grandeur de Dieu dans les merveilles de la Nature, Poeme. Paris: Desaint & Saillant, 1749. Ewalt, Margaret Russell. 2018. “Convergent Knowledge Production in the Spanish Empire: JoséEusebio Llano Zapata’s Memorias histórico, físicas (1757).” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 59 (2): 201–216 Feijoo y Montenegro, Benito. 1726. “Senectud del mundo.” In Theatro crítico universal, o Discursos varios en todo género de materias para desengaño de errores comunes.Vol. 1, Discourse 12. Madrid: Imprenta de Lorenzo Francisco Mojados. ———. 1733. “Solución del gran problema histórico sobre la población de la América y revoluciones del Orbe terráqueo.” In Theatro crítico universal, o Discursos varios en todo género de materias para desengaño de errores comunes.Vol. 5, Discourse 15. Madrid: Imprenta de Francisco del Hierro. Ferraris, Maurizio. 2012. Manifesto del nuovo realismo. Rome and Bari: Laterza. Gabriel, Markus. 2012. Il senso dell’esistenza. Per un nuovo realismo ontologico. Translated by S.L. Maestrone. Foreword by Maurizio Ferraris. Rome: Carocci Editore. García, Gregorio. 1729. Origen de los indios del Nuevo Mundo e Indias Occidentales, averiguado con discurso de opiniones. Edited by Andrés González de Barcia. 2nd, revised and expanded ed. Madrid: Francisco Martínez Abad. Garrido Aranda, Antonio. 2005. “La larga sombra de León Pinelo en las Memorias de Llano Zapata.” Llano Zapata, 93–122. Gerbi, Antonello. 1946. Viejas polémicas sobre el Nuevo Mundo: En el umbral de la conciencia americana. Lima: Banco de Crédito del Perú. Gibson, Susannah. 2015. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? How Eighteenth-Century Science Disrupted the Natural Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gliozzi, Giuliano. 1977. Adamo e il nuovo mondo: La nascità dell’antropologia come ideologia coloniale: dalle genealogie bibliche alle teorie razziali (1500–1700). Florence, Italy: “La Nuova Italia” Editrice. Gordon, Nathan James. 2017. “Ophir de España & Fernando de Montesinos’s Divine Defense of the Spanish Colonial Empire: A Mysterious Ancestral Merging of the Pre-Inca and Christian Histories.” PhD diss., University of Colorado. Hill, Ruth. Forthcoming. “El copernicanismo en Lima fundada (1732) de Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo.” In Configuraciones y transferencias de saberes en la modernidad ilustrada, edited by Rolando Carrasco and Suzanne Schluender. Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert. ———. 2000. Sceptres and Sciences in the Spains: Four Humanists and the New Philosophy, ca.1680–1740. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. ———. 2005. Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America.A Postal Inspector’s Exposé. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. ———. 2019. “The Georacial Past in the New World Present: Antonio de Ulloa’s Noticias Americanas (1772).” In The Routledge Companion to the Spanish Enlightenment, edited by Elizabeth F. Lewis, Mónica Bolufer Peruga, and Catherine M. Jaffe, 30–42. London: Routledge. Huddleston, Lee Eldridge. 1967. Origins of the American Indians: European Concepts, 1492–1729. Austin: University of Texas Press. Huet, Daniel. 1716. Histoire du commerce et de la navigation des anciens. Paris: Antoine-Urbain Coustelier. Hyland, Sabine. 2007. The Quito Manuscript: An Inca History Preserved by Fernando de Montesinos. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Israel, Jonathan. 2002. Radical Enlightenment, Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Juan, Jorge, and Antonio Ulloa. 1748. Relación histórica del viage a la América Meridional hecho de Orden de S. Mag. para medir algunos grados de Meridiano Terrestre y venir por ellos en conocimiento de la verdadera Figura y Magnitud de la Tierra, con otras varias Observaciones Astronómicas y Phísicas. 4 vols. Madrid: Antonio Marín. Katayama Omura, Roberto Juan. 2000. “La filosofía natural y política de Joseph Eusebio de Llano y Zapata (1721–1780).” Logos 5: 203–227. http://www.acuedi.org/doc/4816/la-filosofa-natural-y-poltica-dejosph-eusebio-de-llano-y-zapata-%281721-1780%29.html Kauffmann Doig, Federico. 1996. “Gestación y rostro de la civilización andina.” Lienzo: Revista de la Universidad de Lima 17: 1–29. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern.  Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

180

Old Testament, New World Le Bovier Fontenelle, Bernard. 1742. Oeuvres diverses de M. de Fontenelle, De l’Academie françoise Expanded and revised ed. Amsterdam: La Compagnie. vol. 3, pp. 515–526. Le Clerc, George-Marie, and Comte de Buffon. 1750. Histoire et théorie de la Terre. In Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière avec la Description du Cabinet du Roy. 2nd ed., 3 vols., 1: 65–612. Paris: L’Imprimerie Royale. Le Gendre, Gilbert Marquis de Saint Aubin. 1741. Traité historique et critique de l’Opinion.Vol. 6. 3rd, rev. and expanded ed. Paris: Briasson. León Pinelo, Antonio. 1943. El Paraíso en el Nuevo Mundo. Comentario apologético, historia natural y peregrina de las Indias Occidentales, Islas y Tierra Firme del Mar Occeano. Edited by Raúl Porras Barrenechea, 2 vols. Lima: Imprenta Torres Aguirre. Llano Zapata, Juan Eusebio. 1747. Carta o Diario que escribe don José Eusebio de Llano y Zapata a su más venerado amigo y doctor correspondiente, el Doctor Don Ignacio Chirivoga y Daza, canónigo de la Santa Iglesia de Quito, en que con la mayor verdad y crítica segura le da cuenta de todo lo sucedido en esta capital del Perú desde el Viernes 28 de Ocutbre de 1746, quando experimentó su mayor ruina, con el grande Movimiento de Tierra, que padeció a las diez y media de la noche del mencionado día, hasta 16 de Febrero de 1747. Lima: Francisco Sobrino. ———. 1863. “Observación diaria crítico-histórico-meteorológica contiene todo lo acaecido desde 1° de Marzo de 1747 hasta 28 de Octubre del mismo.” In Terremotos: Colección de las relaciones de los más notables que ha sufrido esta Capital y que la han arruinado, edited by Manuel de Odriozola, 110–147. Lima: Tipografía de Aurelio Alfaro. ———. 2005a. Epítome cronológico o Idea general del Perú. Crónica inédita de 1776. Edited by Víctor Peralta Ruiz. Madrid: Fundación MAPFRE Tavera. ———. 2005b. Memorias histórico, físicas, crítico, apologéticas de la América Meridional. Edited by Ricardo Ramírez Castañeda, Antonio Garrido Aranda, Luis Millones Figueroa,Víctor Peralta Ruiz, and Charles Walker. Lima: IFEA-Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú Fondo Editorial-Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos. MacCormack, Sabine. 1982. “Antonio de la Calancha. Un agustino del siglo XVII en el Nuevo Mundo.” Bulletin Hispanique 84: 60–94. ———. 2007. On the Wings of Time: Rome, the Incas, Spain, and Peru. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Martínez, Elena María. 2008. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Mauriès, Patrick. 2002. Cabinets of Curiosities. New York: Thame & Hudson. Millones Figueroa, Luis. 2005. “La historia natural en las Memorias de José Eusebio Llano Zapata.” In Memorias, Llano Zapata, 75–92. Montero, Ángel. 2003. La paleontología y sus colecciones desde el Real Gabinete de Historia Natural al Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales. Madrid: CSIC. Montesinos, Fernando de. 1639. Auto de la fe celebrado en Lima a 23 de enero de 1639. Lima: Pedro de Cabrera. Pelayo, Francisco. 1996. Del Diluvio al megaterio. Los orígenes de la Paleontología en España. Madrid: CSIC. Peralta Barnuevo, Pedro de. 2017. Lima fundada o La Conquista del Perú. Critical edition, preliminary study, and notes by Jerry W. Williams and David F. Slade. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina. Peralta Ruiz, Víctor. 2007. “Un patronazgo frustrado. El ilustrado peruano José Eusebio Llano Zapata en Lima y Cádiz através de su correspondencia (1743–1780).” Colonial Latin American Review 16 (1): 49–70. Piquer, Andrés. 1745. Física moderna racional y experimental.Valencia, ES: Pascual García. Puig Samper, Miguel Ángel. 1995. “Antonio de Ulloa, naturalista.” In Actas del II Centenario de Don Antonio de Ulloa, edited by M. Losada and C. Varela. Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos-CSIC, 97–124. Popkin, Richard. 1989. “The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Indian Theory.” In Menasseh Ben Israel and His World, edited by Y. Kaplan, H. Mchoulan, and R. Popkin, 63–82. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Rappaport, Rhoda. 1997. When Geologists Were Historians, 1665–1750. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Ray, John. 1692. Miscellaneous Discourses Concerning the Dissolution and Changes of the World. Wherein the Primitive Chaos and Creation, the General Deluge, Fountains, Formed Stones, Sea-Shells Found in the Earth, Subterraneous Trees, Mountains, Earthquakes,Vulcanoes, the Universal Conflagration and Future State, are Largely Discussed and Examined. London: Robert Southwell. ———. 1713. Three Physico-Theological Discourses Concerning I.The Primitive Chaos and Creation of the World. II. The General Deluge, Its Causes and Effects. III. The Dissolution of the World and Future Conflagration, 3rd expanded ed. London: William Innyis.

181

Ruth Hill Regnault, Noël. 1745–1750. Entretiens physiques d’Ariste et d’Eudoxe, ou Physique nouvelle en Dialogues, 7th, rev. ed. 5 vols. Paris: J.T. Herissant Renn, Jürgen. 2018. “Mental Models as Cognitive Instruments in the Transformation of Knowledge.” In Emergence and Expansion of Preclassical Mechanics, edited by Rivka Feldhay, Jürgen Renn, Matthias Schemmel, and Matteo Valleriani, 3–28. New York: Springer. Romm, James. 2001. “Biblical History and the Americas: The Legend of Solomon’s Ophir, 1492–1591.” In Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450 –1800, edited by Paolo Bernardini and Norman Fiering, 27–46. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Roos, Anna Marie. 2007. The Salt of the Earth: Natural Philosophy, Medicine, and Chemistry in England, 1650– 1750. Leiden: Brill. Rousseau, G. S., and David Haycock. 2000. “The Jew of Crane Court: Emanuel Mendes da Costa (1717– 1791), Natural History, and Natural Excess.” History of Science 37: 127–170. Rudwick, Martin J.S. 1976. The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology, 2nd, revised ed. New York: Science History Publications. ——— 2005. Bursting the Limits of Times: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. London: University of Chicago Press. ——— 2010. Worlds Before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ryle, Gilbert. 2009. The Concept of Mind. 60th Anniversary Edition. New York and London: Routledge. Schaposchnik, Anna E. 2015. The Lima Inquisition: The Plight of Crypto-Jews in Seventeenth-Century Peru Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Sequeiros San Román, Leandro. 2002. La extinción de las especies biológicas. Construcción de un paradigma científico. Zaragoza: Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas, Químicas y Naturales. Shalev, Zur. 2010. “Sacred Geography, Antiquarianism, and Visual Erudition: Benito Arias Montano and the Maps in the Antwerp Polyglot Bible.” Imago Mundi 55 (1): 56–80. Tord, Luis Enrique. 1998. “El ultimo quipucayamoc.” Lienzo 19: 129–150. Torquemada, Juan de. 1723. Los veinte y un libros rituales i Monarchía Indiana, edited by Andrés González de Barcia. 3 vols. 2nd, revised and expanded ed. Madrid: Oficina de Nicolás Rodríguez. Vetancurt, Augustín. 1971. Teatro mexicano: Descripción breve de los sucesos ejemplares históricos y religiosos del Nuevo Mundo de las Indias. Facsimile ed. Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa Woodward, John. 1726. An Essay toward a Natural History of the Earth and Terrestrial Bodies, Especially Minerals, as Also of the Seas, Rivers, and Springs, with an Account of the Universal Flood and of the Effects that It Had upon the Earth. Rev. and enlarged ed. London: Thomas Edlin. ———. 1735. Géographie Physique ou Essay sur l’Histoire Naturelle de la Terre. Translated by M. Noguez and revised by R. P. Niceron. Paris: Briasson.

182

10 THE “CANNIBAL COGITO” AND BRAZILIAN ANTROPOFAGIA Radical heterogeneity or “family resemblance”? Luís Madureira

Lévi-Strauss famously asserts that of all “savage practices,” cannibalism is “the one we find the most horrible and disgusting” (1961, 385). For René Girard, too, the ritual consumption of the bodily fragments of dead ancestors or slain enemies has a “frankly disagreeable nature” and is “often regarded as an aberration” (1989, 274). As Phillip Boucher writes, cannibals are “the ignoble savages par excellence” (1992, 19). Nevertheless, both Girard and Lévi-Strauss (­apparently reproducing Montaigne’s familiar perspectival inversion) swiftly proceed to relativize the l­oathing they evoke. Thus, for Girard, cannibalism, despite its ostensible repulsiveness, is readily intelligible in the context of his sweeping comparative analysis of sacrificial rites. Concomitantly, Lévi-Strauss alludes to the underlying similarities between “savage” and “civilized” religious convictions: “We must realize that certain of our own usages, if investigated by an observer from a different society, would seem to him similar in kind to the cannibalism which we consider uncivilized” (1961, 386). Peter Hulme corroborates Lévi-Strauss’s and Girard’s appraisals, considering the practice “the mark of unregenerate savagery” (1986, 3). Ultimately, though, he questions whether any indigenous group (in the Caribbean, at least) ever engaged in ritual anthropophagy (1986, 79). In his wide-ranging study of the deployment of the cannibal trope in the Americas, Carlos Jáuregui recalls that the term caníbal is one of the first neologisms to emerge from the early modern contact zone. Echoing Hulme, Jáuregui underscores that it also constitutes a linguistic, ethnographic and “teratological” misunderstanding [malentendido] (2008, 14). For Hulme, this equivocation “puts the association between the word ‘cannibal’ and the eating of human flesh into doubt” (19); we simply “do not know” whether “the Caribs really, as a matter of custom and practice, [ate] human flesh” (79). For Jáuregui, cannibal is the “master signifier” for colonial alterity (2008, 13–14): “the cannibal tells the time of savagery” (Jáuregui 2008, 109) [“El caníbal marca la hora del salvajismo”]. Neither Hulme nor Jáuregui go quite so far as William Arens (1979), who famously reduces the practice to a pervasive, unsubstantiated myth propagated to oppress and enslave indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, they concur that, either as a trope or a

183

Luís Madureira

signifier, “cannibal” “has gained its entire meaning from within the discourse of European colonialism” (Hulme 86). It has served “to prop up imperialism’s discursive edifice, [forging] close links between the imputation of cannibalism and the conquest of America” (Jáuregui 2008, 15, 77). In this way, their principal concern, as Jáuregui puts it, is neither the cannibals themselves nor the dietary habits of this or that aboriginal group, but rather the cultural meanings of ­cannibalism (Jáuregui 2008, 22). In Hulme’s words, their analyses center on how cannibalism operates as a key feature of “the discourse of colonialism” (3). Although I fundamentally concur with Hulme’s and Jáuregui’s ground-breaking critiques, I take a different tack in the reconsideration of the trope and practice of anthropophagy that ­follows. As with Lévi-Strauss and Girard, my aim is also to understand the practice from a comparative perspective. As Phillip Boucher notes in his gloss of Neil Whitehead’s careful assessment of the historical evidence of Carib cannibalism, though we certainly ought to examine early modern European accounts of the practice “with skeptical caution,” we should not dismiss them offhand (1992, 6). Like Whitehead’s, my working assumption in this chapter is that there is evidence of “ritual cannibalism of war captives among both the Caribs and other Amerindian groups” (1984, 69). In this regard, the far-reaching cultural and intellectual implications of what Isabelle Combès names the “cannibal tragedy” (1992) are considerably more pertinent to my analysis. It was this drama that the Tupinambá Indians of coastal Brazil purportedly performed on a few crucial occasions before horrified European eyes.The rich and varied accounts of these performances (either by eyewitnesses or hearsay) have proved invaluable to subsequent ethnological reconstructions of the ritual, as well as speculations about its function and meaning. As Girard asserts, “the Tupinambá occupy a prominent place in the intellectual history of modern Europe, [serving] as models for the pre-eighteenth-century portrait of the ‘noble savage,’ who was shortly to play a great role in the history of Western humanism” (1989, 274). It is perhaps to the Tupi’s lasting contribution to European political thought that Brazilian modernist Oswald de Andrade (the epitome of the “cosmopolitan literato” and pugnacious homo ludens, in Alfredo Bosi’s apt characterization [2007, 357]), mordantly refers in his iconic and playfully iconoclastic 1928 Manifesto antropófago: “Without us, Europe wouldn’t even have its poor declaration of the rights of man” (1972, 14).1 Published in the first issue of the Revista de Antropofagia, the Manifesto launched Brazil’s short-lived, yet far-ranging anthropophagy movement. Deriving its inspiration from the canonical definition of ritual cannibalism as an extreme form of revenge, a “practice destined exclusively to enhance the vital force of those who p­ erform it” (Méttraux 1950, 266), modernism’s metaphoric anthropophagy likewise denotes a violent and arguably “indiscriminate” incorporation of “alien” cultural “forms and contents” into the national body (Bosi 1992, 333). By the early 1930s, the Manifesto’s author had repudiated the “anthropophagic measles rash” (Andrade 1971, 38), in the wake of his political turn to Communism. For the next few decades, anthropophagy was largely consigned to oblivion. In the late 1960s, however, it experienced a vibrant and sustained revival. Since then, it has arguably become a recurring national “obsession” that endures as “a central notion in Brazilian culture” (Rocha 2011, 648). Nonetheless, the efficacy and disseminating potential of the metaphor extends well beyond the confines of Brazilian cultural history.

Counter-discourse or “misplaced idea”? In such a context, João Cezar Castro Rocha’s rejection of the “blameworthy effortlessness” with which Brazilian intellectuals insist on viewing anthropophagy as distinctively Brazilian (2011, 667) seems slightly incongruous. Indeed, Rocha’s attendant plea to expand “the geographic borders” of the “anthropophagic strategy” (2011, 667), to change “the monotonous recipe for 184

The “cannibal cogito”

national identity” (1999, 5), appears already to have been heeded. As Jáuregui indicates, the trope of cannibalism has played a vital role in the “definition of Latin American cultural identity,” from early modern European constructions of the New World as “monstrous and savage” to ­twentiethand twenty-first-century cultural narratives in which the cannibal has been varyingly redefined in terms of “the construction of (post)colonial and ‘postmodern’ identities” (2008, 15). More recently, Jáuregui has argued that anthropophagy “has become an obligatory genealogical foundation for contemporary academic debates on hybridity and postcolonialism” (2012, 22). A ­cursory glance at the critical bibliography on anthropophagy readily corroborates Jáuregui’s contention.Thus, Haroldo de Campos maintains that antropofagia entails “a transculturation; better yet, a ‘transvaluation’: a critical view of history as a negative function (in Nietzsche’s sense), capable as much of appropriation as of expropriation, de-hierarchization, deconstruction” (1981, 11–12). Jorge Schwartz argues that Andrade’s manifesto deploys “one of the most original strategies developed in Latin America to resist inevitable processes of colonization” (1999, 164). Eduardo Subirats contends that the movement “opened the way in a counter-direction to that of the European avant-garde” (1999, 176). Albeit acknowledging that the current cultural and political moment differs substantially from the one in which the Manifesto was produced, Carlos Rincón asserts that “the [anthropophagic] metaphor becomes indispensable for the search for new models of cultural appropriation” (1999, 348). And Vera Follein de Figueiredo affirms concurrently that “the indigenous anthropophagic ritual is recuperated as the metaphor for a nonexclusive world view; consumption would imply the recognition of the Other’s values” (1999, 239). As Sara Castro-Klarén suggests, the Manifesto seems to have turned into a “commonplace” instance of a colonial or subaltern culture’s capacity to assume an active, indeed “aggressive” and ultimately transformative posture with respect to the absorption of extraneous cultural materials (2000, 297). Similarly, García Canclini regards anthropophagy as a modernist “antecedent” to postmodern practices of “decollecting and deterritorialization” (1995, 242), whereas Mignolo (incorrectly ascribing the concept’s authorship to Mário de Andrade) posits it as a model of “border thinking,” a knowledge produced from a subaltern perspective that supplants the ­constricting logic structuring the idea of “civilization” (2000, 303). While I have insisted that modernist anthropophagy cannot but acknowledge its indebtedness to and embeddedness in the very culture it seeks to undo, in my own reading of the movement (Madureira 2005, 51), I have likewise proposed anthropophagy as a mode of vengeful incorporation of colonialism’s cultural and epistemological legacy. Nevertheless, despite its wide currency, this is by no means an unchallenged perspective. Roberto Schwarz, for instance, dismisses antropofagia as a nationalist abstraction, an empty analogy that “throws absolutely no light on the politics and aesthetics of contemporary cultural life” (1992, 9). Similarly, for Neil Larsen, the movement “represents little more than the effort to outsmart rhetorically the dialectic of dependency” (1990, 81). Even more dismissively, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht reduces the Manifesto’s relevance for contemporary literary studies to its time-bound invocation of “a future that never became a reality” (1999, 198).2 Beyond that, the German critic concludes morosely, “there is not much else, I am afraid, in terms of aesthetic quality or of philosophical complexity, the author of the Manifesto antropófago could brag about” (1999, 198). In a more balanced and nuanced overview of the movement, Jáuregui, defining anthropophagy as the aesthetic production of a cosmopolitan bourgeoisie disconnected “from any social movement or actual decolonization effort,” regards efforts to grasp it as an adumbration of a postcolonial critique of coloniality as unwarranted (2012, 27). Interestingly, this assessment coincides with Oswald de Andrade’s own self-critique as a bourgeois “clown,” an incredulous servant of the class of which he confesses to have been the “cretinous, sentimental and poetic sign” (1971, 38). More recently, however, Jáuregui appears to have modulated his 185

Luís Madureira

stance in an examination of the relatively unknown textual production of Osvaldo Costa, one of the early contributors to the Revista de Antropofagia. Asserting that Brazilian scholars of Modernismo have “unfairly ignored” Costa’s contributions, Jáuregui uncovers in his “alternative voice … an example of what Walter Mignolo aptly calls border thinking” (2015, 12, 7). Ultimately, however, whether antropofagia is indeed “decolonial very much avant la lettre,” as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro proclaims in the preface to a recent study of Andrade’s Manifesto (2016, n.p.), or whether it is “a powerful counter-discourse to colonial continuities,” as Carlos Fausto maintains (2001, 21), is only tangential to the central question that occupies me here. As I mention above, I have sought elsewhere to understand it as an effort to elaborate a sustained thinking about alterity, as a form of resistance to and absorption of the West, to cite Jáuregui’s assessment of Oswaldo Costa’s reformulation of the trope (2008, 441; 2015, 5). Nevertheless, and as the late Neil Whitehead astutely points out in his critique of my analysis of the movement, I consistently neglect to “disaggregate the Tupinological texts [sixteenth-century European chronicles as well as the modernist appropriations of these source documents] to trace specific kinds of readings or borrowings from these materials” (2008, lv). He adds generously that such close scrutiny of these early modern source texts would not be “necessarily relevant” to the specific terms of my discussion (lv). In the present reconsideration of the trope, practice and conception of cannibalism, I should like to explore precisely the relevance of the link between actual and metaphoric cannibalism (to the extent that a reconstruction of this “original” or “real” ethnographic ground is viable). Intimately related to the problem of engaging with “subaltern” or indigenous thought, of a putative “rearticulation and appropriation of global designs by and from the perspective of local histories” (Mignolo 2000, 39), the question I should like to investigate more closely below thus pertains precisely to the fraught relationship between the anthropophagic metaphor and the conception and practice of cannibalism among the Tupi. Such a comparison must necessarily reckon with the inescapable conundrum that by the early eighteenth century the Tupi were no more than a memory. Jáuregui’s remark concerning the lack of an indigenous perspective on the cultural practices and beliefs observed and reported by fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europeans (“there was no Carib Garcilaso who might have displaced hegemonic discourses and left behind ‘the version of the vanquished’” [2008, 64]) is particularly germane in the case of Brazil’s Tupi. Given this irremediable void, they endure, in the main, as distorted figures in the very European writings which register and often paradoxically legitimate their annihilation. It is to these texts, marked by “exaggeration and unfortunate circumstances” (Combès 1992, 24), that both antropofagistas and ethnographers must turn in order to recover the meaning of ritual cannibalism. The symbolic lesson which the Tupinambá impart to the former remains of course irreducibly figural. As Brazilian anthropologist Carlos Fausto notes, Andrade’s naked cannibal is but “a figuration removed from effective indigenous realities” (1999, 76).

Antropofagia and the “cannibal cogito” The key question I should like to pursue, then, is whether “Tupi cannibalism … indeed stand[s] in the way of the intellectual project of the movimento antropofágico,” as Sara Castro-Klarén contends (2000, 312), or whether the antropofagista figuration, along with its “ferocious humor” (Viveiros de Castro 2014, 143), is compatible with the anthropological and metaphysical “truth” of ritual anthropophagy, as Viveiros de Castro has recently suggested (2016, n.p). Are these two moments defined by a radical heterogeneity, or can we discern what Wittgenstein calls “family resemblances,” “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail” (1986, 32). Neil Whitehead discerns a 186

The “cannibal cogito”

broader and underlying similitude between the reiterated “barbarity” of the ritual and the societal logic of coeval Europeans. For him, the principal link between the collective “cannibal tragedy” and the theatricalization of violence in European public punishment and execution resides in the close connection between “the destruction of the bodies of the condemned” and “the reproduction of society,” even though in the European case the victims were excluded rather than incorporated (2008, lxvi–lxvii). In the last instance, however, Whitehead’s caveat strongly suggests that despite the presumptive contiguities between New World cannibalism and state-sponsored spectacles of violence in the Old World, a crucial and irreducible discontinuity, concerning the scale, aim, and conceptual underpinnings of the two “scenes” of bodily destruction, remains. Contradictorily, the analogy ultimately underscores the incommensurability between the two rituals. Conceding that his sympathies lie with the antropofagistas (2001, 21), Carlos Fausto argues that the “metaphor of anthropophagy [is] congruent with indigenous representations” of the practice and discloses “a deep understanding of cannibalism as a practical and conceptual operation” (1999, 81, 76). For Viveiros de Castro, the fact that Oswald de Andrade was “a man without a profession,” that he was never a tenured intellectual from the periphery and remained unaffiliated with “any North-American university,” contributes signally to the Manifesto’s subversive potential (2016, n.p.). Tellingly, in somewhat comparable fashion, Montaigne deems his informant, that “simple and rough fellow … fit to bear true witness” precisely because, unlike the professional intellectuals of the time, who “never show you things purely as they are, [but rather] bend and disguise them,” he can show things purely as they are (1999, 98). Given Viveiros de Castro’s vigorous defense of the Manifesto’s author as “the most directly—and subversively— philosophical” of Brazilian writers (2016, n.p.), it seems ironic that Castro-Klarén draws precisely on the Brazilian anthropologist’s reading of Tupi “metaphysics of predation” to ground her assertion of a radical distinction between Tupi thought and what Viveiros de Castro calls Oswald de Andrade’s explicit and “barbarous” appropriation of a field “officially” identified with the “academic discipline” of philosophy (2016, n.p.). According to Viveiros de Castro, it is not properly speaking a “body” or substance that is consumed in the act of cannibalism.3 In an early articulation of this thesis, he designates the ritual as a “supreme form of spiritualization,” an attempted immortalization through sublimation of the corruptible element of the human being: Tupinambá society included its enemies, and did not exist outside its relationship with the Other—a generalized heteronym, an “external” dialectic of human sacrifice, the necessity of alien deaths and of death at alien hands … the incorporation of the incorporeal, a becoming-enemy: that is cannibalism; the opposite of the Narcissistic suction of identification: it is he who eats that both others and becomes other. (1986, 666, 669) Acknowledging her indebtedness to Viveiros de Castro’s work, Isabelle Combès understands the act in terms of a surpassing [dépassement] of the human condition in diverse forms. For the victim, whose killing epitomizes the warrior’s “beautiful death,” the ritual guarantees admittance into the mythical Land Without Evil (1992, 188). On the other hand, the slayer, whom custom enjoins from participating in the cannibal feast and who has, in the course of the act, become uncannily akin [étrangement semblable] to his victim, is equally assured of a favorable posthumous destiny (188). Those who consume the victim’s flesh (and on this point Combès’s interpretation of the ritual deviates substantially from Viveiros de Castro’s) experience a supersession of their human condition “from below” (155), “regressing in some fashion to the animal portion that comprises humankind” (170). For Viveiros de Castro, the body consumed in the anthropophagic 187

Luís Madureira

ritual becomes “a sign with a purely positional value” (2014, 142). In other words, it was “the enemy’s relation to those who consumed him,” that is, his condition as an enemy, that was ultimately incorporated. This operation, which Viveiros de Castro fittingly designates as the “cannibal cogito,”4 is thus defined by the assimilation of the signs of the victim’s “alterity” with the aim of reaching “his alterity as point of view on the Self: Cannibalism and the peculiar form of war with which it is bound up involve a paradoxical movement of reciprocal self-determination through the point of view of the enemy” (2014, 142–143). In Philippe Descola’s cogent account of this singular “mechanism of constitutive otherness,” the Tupi’s ritual anthropophagy: is not a narcissistic absorption of qualities and attributes, nor is it a contrastive operation of differentiation (I am not the other that I am eating); it is, on the contrary, an attempt to “become other” by incorporating the enemy’s position vis-à-vis me, for this will open up a possibility for me to get out of myself [sortir de moi-même] so as to see myself from the outside, as a singularity (the one whom I am eating defines who I am).” (2013, 255; 2005, 352) Exo cannibalism, along with other affinal practices associated with indigenous groups from the lowlands of South America, responds to the same overriding “metaphysical” necessity: the only way to construct a self [faire du soi] is by concretely assimilating alien persons and bodies, not as life-giving substances, trophies that bestow prestige, or captives who provide labor,5 but as indicators of that external gaze that they bring to bear on me, by reason of their own provenance.” (Descola 2013, 255) There is certainly a distinction between the process of “becoming Other” subtending ritual cannibalism and the exclusive, aphoristic “interest in what is not mine” that the Manifesto memorably proclaims: “Só me interessa o que não é meu.” For Castro-Klarén, nowhere is this rift more perceptible than in Andrade’s later and more conventionally philosophical reflection on anthropophagy (2000, 197). Less than two decades after his public repudiation of antropofagia as Modernismo’s bout of measles, and in the wake of his disenchantment with Brazil’s Communist Party, Andrade returned to his project of recovering and appropriating the practice’s utopian promise from a philosophical standpoint. Aside from sundry essays and speeches, perhaps the best-known of these later writings on anthropophagy is A Crise da filosofia messiânica (The Crisis of Messianic Philosophy), a thesis presented in 1950 as part of his candidacy to a professorship in Philosophy, Science and Letters at the University of São Paulo (which he never received). The essay develops and systematizes the Manifesto’s lapidary aphorisms, whose conceptual debts to Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud are already evident (Madureira 2005, 36–39). In A Crise, Andrade defines anthropophagy as a “metaphysical operation,” a Weltanschauung or “mode of thought” linked to humanity’s primitive phase (1972, 77). The envisaged reversal or transvaluation of the history and philosophy of the West, as well as the attendant reclamation of a primitive, “Dyonisian” past, derive significantly from Nietzschean vitalism and critique of values. As Benedito Nunes remarks, a geopolitical division between North and South informs Andrade’s account of humanity’s socio-historical evolution (1972, xlix). World history is accordingly defined by a transhistorical dialectical antagonism between primitive and civilized humanity, which splits into a series of interrelated binarisms: i.e., a humanistic cultivation of leisure [otium] negated by the capitalist or Protestant work ethic [nec-otium] (ócio versus negócio [trade or commerce], in Portuguese), a “matriarchal” or “natural” culture opposed to (and by) “patriarchal” civilization. Patriarchal culture thus constitutes the second or negative moment of the dialectic, while 188

The “cannibal cogito”

anthropophagy emerges as the third or sublatory term, the “synthesis” of natural and civilized man (1972, 79): “Keyserling’s technicized barbarian” in the Manifesto (1972, 14), “technicized natural man,” and “the technicized restoration of an anthropophagic culture” in A Crise (1972, 79, 129). As Jáuregui remarks, notwithstanding its developmentalist optimism and abiding credulity in technology’s liberatory promise, A Crise “announced a time of alterity [un tiempo-otro] which remains valid even today” (2008, 460). For Castro-Klarén, in Tupi metaphysics (as elucidated by Viveiros de Castro), “there is no place for the dialectical thought” (2000, 311) that Andrade deploys in what Augusto de Campos terms “the only original Brazilian philosophy”6 (1975, n.p.). She replies emphatically in the negative to the Manifesto’s signature interrogative (“Tupy or not Tupy,” “one must ineluctably acknowledge that the answer … must indeed be not Tupi on all counts”), arguing that “the force of the discourse of Tupi anthropophagy, a subalternized knowledge,” ultimately subverts both the Manifesto’s “dialectic and its revolutionary claims” as well as A Crise’s conceptual scaffolding, that is, “the European root system [that] suffocates the Tupi anthropophagic metaphor” (2000, 313). As I mention above, antropofagia has been variously regarded as a counter-discourse, a cogent example of what Walter Mignolo calls border thinking, even an instance of transculturation: “Every past that is ‘other’ to us deserves to be negated” (Campos 1981, 12). In Mary Louise Pratt’s elegantly concise definition, transculturation describes “how subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted to them by a dominant or metropolitan culture”; it thus signifies a relative yet crucial degree of agential prerogative: “While subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own, and what they use it for” (1992, 6). Similarly, Mignolo characterizes border knowledge (or border thinking) as a discourse “conceived at the conflictive intersection” between the rhetoric, philosophy and science produced from the perspective of modern colonialism and knowledge (or “gnoseology”) produced “from a subaltern perspective,” from “the perspective of colonial modernities in Asia, Africa, and the Americas/ Caribbean” (2000, 11). While classifying Tupi anthropophagy as a subalternized knowledge, Castro-Klarén’s reading appears to preclude the kind of double (or dialectic) “subaltern,” and productively contradictory operation that Pratt, Mignolo and several other like-minded critics ascribe to the interaction between dominant epistemologies and subordinate or local knowledge forms. The subalternized “cannibal cogito” must thus remain inexorably incommensurable with its modernist or “decolonial” recuperation. The sustained questioning, indeed satirization of the utopian appropriation of indigenous cultures has been a staple of contemporary Brazilian “nativist” novels at least since the 1960s, that is, since the “tropicalist” revival of modernist anthropophagy. In Antonio Callado’s Quarup (1967), for example, a folklorist devises a tortuous theory about the formation of the Brazilian “mentality” based on the Amazonian legends of the tortoise Jabuti, and travels to the rain forest to test out his ideas. However, at the end of his journey he finds the autochthonous denizens of Brazil’s geographic center in an advanced stage of decay, mortally wounded by their contact with “civilization.” Bereft of their former vitality, ravaged by fever and dysentery and alienated from their sustaining rituals and myths, they resemble “skeletons emerging from primeval caves to dwell in the realm the living” (2000, 361). In Callado’s A Expedição de Montaigne (1982), an even more parodic “white savior,” a Carioca journalist whose knowledge of “the jungle” is reduced to the urban, human-made forest of Tijuca, proclaims himself “a liberator of foresters, anti-bandeirante expeditionary, counter-Cabral, non-discoverer,” and embarks on a mission “to shove a tidal bore [pororoca] up Brazil’s white history and, after a brief five-century break, restore the broken balance” (1982, 11). Once he reaches his destination, a Camuirá village in the heart of the Amazon, a shaman mistakes him for a nineteenth-century German ethnologist and 189

Luís Madureira

proceeds to incinerate him alive inside an Amazonian hawk cage. Although the narrator speculates that the activist may have, in his imagination and in the pangs of his agony, elevated his own immolation to the hallowed heights of Joan of Arc’s martyrdom, his absurd sacrifice will remain unknown, unregistered either “in writing or by living voice” (122). The author-narrator of Bernardo Carvalho’s fictional biography of the ill-fated American ethnologist Buell Quain regards the Xingu indigenous territory “as the very image of hell” (2007, 87). For him, the Krahô Indians are “the orphans of civilization,” afflicted by an “irremediable … neediness” (“uma carência irreparável” [2006, 109]), constrained to sustain an unequal relationship of dependency with a white world they strive in vain to grasp (2007, 132). In the end, despite his pledge never to forget them, the narrator “abandoned them, like the other whites” (2007, 133). The foregoing perfunctory commentary gives but short shrift to the depth and complexity of these texts. It seems nevertheless plausible that they trouble, or at least call into question the persisting “anthropophagic” notion, which Darcy Ribeiro, for example, ratifies, that contemporary Brazilians “continue to be Indians in the bodies [they] possess and in the culture that illumines and guides” them (1996, 13). In the more satirical and polemical vein of Ribeiro’s Utopia Selvagem, “we Brazilians are … detribalized, de-indianized, deracinated Indians … Indians have travelled across the centuries. [They] will be part of the civilization of the future” (1982, 122). Comparably in a broad sense to Castro-Klarén, Callado and Carvalho insist on the incommensurability between the indigenous and the “civilized” modern worlds. They implicitly dispute Ribeiro’s correlative assertion that “the anthropophagic battle cry” [o grito antropofágico] embodies the authentic national “being”: With Oswald, we eat our most sober and austere repast in order to assume our [true] being in the face of the foreign rabble [estrangeirada] […] [we] devour [what is foreign] and turn it into the compost that makes us blossom. (1982, 33) Yet Castro-Klarén does not halt at a repudiation of nostalgic or utopian figurations of Brazil’s indigenous peoples. For her, the “cannibal cogito” becomes the privileged sign of a “subalternized” disruption of the characteristically Western incorporation of alterity, of the sort of “synthesis” (Aufhebung) or dialectical thought that informs Oswald de Andrade’s recovery of anthropophagy. As such, her critical discourse recuperates (or appropriates) the Tupi in turn as the exempla of a philosophical thinking or “transvaluation [that] would open the path to writing a history articulated on dimensions other than the category of the self ” (2000, 312).The role the Tupi play in her analysis, then, comes somewhat paradoxically to typify the centripetal engagement with cultures from the periphery of the modern West that Roy Wagner describes as a form of cultural self-fashioning. In the West’s anthropological study of other peoples, the latter become foils, “invit[ing] comparison as ‘other ways’ of dealing with our own reality. We incorporate them within our reality, and so incorporate their ways of life within our own self-invention” (Wagner 1981, 100–101). In Descola’s ironic gloss of this passage, European ethnologists and cultural critics “are forced into a kind of well-meaning cannibalism [cannibalisme bienveillant], as they repeatedly incorporate non-moderns’ objectivization of themselves into our own objectivization of ourselves” (2013, 81).

Anthropophagy and perspectivism Could we trace instead even the faintest outline of a contiguity, draw a distant “family resemblance” between antropofagia and Tupi ritual cannibalism? Or, is the modernist appropriation of 190

The “cannibal cogito”

the practice irremediably tainted by a colonizing impetus, by an “impenitent nostalgia,” as Descola designates it (2013, 87)? Is it always and inescapably untenable to posit Andrade’s Manifesto, as Viveiros de Castro appears to do, as adumbrating the “comparative” or “symmetrical” anthropology that Latour defines in his classic text, which “no longer compares cultures, setting aside its own, which through some astonishing privilege possesses a unique access to universal Nature [but] compares natures-cultures” (1993, 96)? More recently, Latour asserts that: comparative anthropology now has the means to renew a dialogue which seems to me more fruitful than the ones suggested by UNESCO or by the tiresome resentments of anti-imperialism. For the first time, perhaps, we no longer have any barbarians either outside of our boundaries or, most importantly, in our midst.” (Latour 2009, [76]) Descola grasps this perspectival “symmetry” as essentially a matter of situating: our own exoticism as one particular case within a general grammar of cosmologies rather than continuing to attribute to our own vision of the world the value of a standard by which to judge the manner in which thousands of civilizations have managed to acquire some inkling of that vision.” (2013, 88) As Viveiros de Castro explains, Latour’s notion of symmetrical anthropology (Latour 1991) intersects at least partially with the “reverse anthropology” Roy Wagner proposes as a possibility for engaging with non-Western and non-modern cultures (2014, 50). As Wagner argues, “anthropology will not come to terms with its mediative basis and its professed aims until our invention of other cultures can reproduce, at least in principle, the way in which those cultures invent themselves” (1981, 30). A reverse anthropology would thus assume, as its point of departure, the questionable adequateness of the term “culture” as a descriptor of tribal societies, and subsequently enable a literalization of “the metaphors of modern industrial civilization from the standpoint of tribal society” (Wagner 1981, 30). If such a symmetrical or reverse anthropology were to emerge, it would be necessarily premised on the existence of: a powerful indigenous intellectual structure that is inter alia capable of providing a counter-description of the image drawn of it by Western anthropology and thereby capable, again, of “returning to us an image in which we are unrecognizable to ourselves.” (Viveiros de Castro 2014, 55) Viveiros de Castro’s reading of modernist anthropophagy allows for the likelihood that it anticipates or at least partially coheres with this perspectival symmetry of reversal. By contrast, CastroKlarén’s interpretation of the movement brooks no such adumbration. In the remaining pages of this chapter, I seek a way out of, or, perhaps more accurately, a way around this impasse. I attempt to pay heed both to the discontinuities and resemblances between modernist anthropophagy and the “cannibal cogito,” while tentatively sidestepping a wholesale subsumption or reduction of the metaphysics of ritual anthropophagy to speculative reason. By mooting the possibility of reflecting upon “the diversity of customs in the world without succumbing either to a fascination with the exceptional or to a refusal of the positive sciences,” Descola indicates a possible path to follow (2013, 85). Viveiros de Castro brands Descola’s 191

Luís Madureira

postulate that four core ontologies determine the underlying variables of social existence as a “completely analogist” intellectual enterprise. Nevertheless, he concurs to an extent with his French colleague: keeping the values of the other implicit does not mean celebrating whatever transcendent mystery it supposedly keeps enclosed in itself. It consists in refusing to actualize the possibles expressed by indigenous thought, making a decision to maintain them, infinitely, as possibles—neither derealizing them as fantasies of the other nor fantasizing that they are actual for us.” (2014, 196) Hence, comparability between cultures (for instance, the “comparison” resulting from the encounter between anthropologists and indigenous peoples) does not necessarily entail “epistemological transparency” (Viveiros de Castro 2014, 85). As with any translation, cultural translation is underpinned by what the Brazilian anthropologist defines as equivocation, understood not in the empirical sense of the myriad of “deformations and shortcomings” that can undercut the validity of anthropological discourse, but as “a properly transcendental category, a constitutive dimension,” the “condition of possibility of anthropological discourse that justifies [its] existence” (89). Ineluctably circumscribed to and indeed, to a considerable degree, determined by its own time and place (or “mis-place,” in Roberto Schwartz’s well-known formulation), ­antropofagia is thus the result of a mode of cultural and aesthetic “translation” which “takes up residence in the space of equivocation” (Viveiros de Castro 2014, 89). As an operation grounded and sustained by the interrogation of any “original univocality” or “essential similarity” between how the Tupi viewed ritual cannibalism and what the modern anthropophagists had to say about it, antropofagia, as I have noted elsewhere, is necessarily indebted to and embedded in the very cultural and philosophical tradition it seeks to displace (Madureira 2005, 51). It cannot but disclose its conceptual dependency on what Gayatri Spivak has called the “magisterial texts” of the West (1999, 7). Whether antropofagia indeed “emerges only in the form of vestiges and traces inscribed in history as the potential to subvert history’s very temporality” (Nodari 2011, 479) is a question I shall intentionally leave open. What seems nevertheless plausible is that it may, “at the same time,” be “decolonial … avant la lettre” (Viveiros de Castro 2016, n.p.), or “congruent with indigenous representations” of the ritual (Fausto 1999, 81), and “suffocated” by European philosophy’s “root system” (Castro-Klarén 2000, 313): a discourse produced by and largely addressed to a masculine subject (Jáuregui 2008, 422). Notwithstanding its consciously revolutionary or ostensibly anti-patriarchal ethos, an unmistakably masculinist gaze pervades Andrade’s writings. It is to this contradiction that I now turn.

The “women’s portion”: gender and sexual cannibalism Nowhere is this masculinist perspective more visible than in Andrade’s association of anthropophagy with a matriarchal order which the patriarchal logic that presumably subtends modern Western civilization allegedly deposes. It is for the return of this “matriarchy of Pindorama,”7 as the Manifesto puts it, for a matriarchal revolution, that antropofagia calls. Castro-Klarén faults Andrade for relying excessively on the work of nineteenth-century Swiss antiquarian J.J. Bachofen for his construction of matriarchy, thus straying from “the path of Tupi thought”; instead, he “allowed himself to be seduced by the simulacrum of matriarchy” (Castro-Klarén 2000, 312). Similarly, Jáuregui contends that, while “anthropophagic matriarchy certainly had an emancipatory horizon, the Subject of this liberation remains stubbornly masculine” (2008, 422). 192

The “cannibal cogito”

“The mother occupied the problematic place of alterity: savage nature, primitive other, pre-logic mind, and so on” (Jáuregui 2012, 27). Emanuelle Oliveira goes beyond questioning the conventional figuration of the matriarch in Andrade’s Manifesto and subsequent philosophical writings and argues that his texts “end up reaffirming the same structures [he] assumes to be repudiating, since they privilege a phallocentric discourse” grounded on the phallus as the synecdoche for an “irrational” and disruptive (i.e., primitivist and revolutionary) potential (1999, 270, 265). Oliveira founds her argument on close readings of assorted sections of Andrade’s Serafim Ponte Grande, the “composite” and “hybrid” text fashioned out of “scraps and ‘samples’ of several possible books” (Campos 1971, 98–99), the “novela-carnaval” (Jáuregui 2008, 449) that the modernist author himself describes as a sort of threnodial valediction to antropofagia: “Necrology of the bourgeoisie. Epitaph of what I was” (Andrade 1971, 119). The section to which I now briefly turn, which Oliveira does not analyze, is titled precisely “Os Antropófagos.” Since it closes the book, following a fragment called “O fim de Serafim,” one might read it as a “final word” of sorts on the movement. The section, which Haroldo Campos classifies as Serafim’s “real ending” and, alternately, “the new beginning of everything” (108), stages a scene of unbridled and polymorphous sexuality aboard the ceaselessly traveling ocean liner El Durasno (sic). This transfiguration of the cannibal feast into a phallic ritual evidently figures the anthropophagic revolution, laying down “the basis for a “future … liberated humanity,” “an anonymous society with a priapic foundation” (Andrade 1971, 196). A lengthy, decontextualized and substantially “doctored” epigraph from Jesuit Father Antonio Ruiz de Montoya’s Conquista espiritual (1639) inaugurates and, in a sense, sets the tone for the priapic excess governing “Os antropófagos.” The fragment is intended to illustrate the mid-sixteenthcentury religious and political conflict between Jesuits and colonists. Jesuit missionaries saw the early settlers as a direct threat to their goal of spiritually “conquering” the Indians, since the latter routinely engaged in sexual contact through concubinage with and exploitation of Amerindian women, in some cases adopted “native customs,” including consuming human flesh and going naked. In Andrade’s version of the passage, the Fathers express compassion for a “Christian,” who humbly informs them that he has been proffering assorted items of his own clothing to the Indians as a means of bringing them into the Christian fold (1971, 195).8 Soon after the man’s departure, the clerics discover to their chagrin that he had in fact used his garments to seduce “several young girls and maidens who were to remain in his service and he hit the road with them” (195). As rendered by Andrade, the passage effectively blends some of the Manifesto’s central tenets: its “reaction against clothed man,” “against every catechism,” “against antagonistic sublimations … brought over here in caravels,” “against the truth of missionary peoples” (1972, 13–14, 17). Above all, it reaffirms its stance “against [the Jesuit Father José de] Anchieta” and resolutely in favor of “the patriarch João Ramalho, founder of São Paulo” (1972, 19), “God’s declared enemy” (Callado 2004, 160–161), who famously fathered countless mestiço children who would go on to serve as interpreters and go-betweens, or the vanguard of colonial settlement. Significantly, the agency of this ribald rejection of Christian morality belongs to a sham European Christian whose libertine and presumably liberatory apostasy is mediated by and ultimately ratified through the appropriation and exploitation of the bodies of indigenous women. In his rendition of Montoya’s text, Andrade expunges a key reference to the fact that the Spaniard had actually “auctioned off his garments … [to purchase] with each item either an Indian woman or a boy” (Montoya 1892, 33). What in the original was a condemnation of the colonists’ prevalent practice of capturing and enslaving Indians becomes in Andrade’s “translation” a validation of the “emancipatory” anti-clericalism, iconoclasm and unrestrained eroticism of Brazil’s early colonists. Even before it would find its canonical expression in Gilberto Freyre’s 193

Luís Madureira

study of the formation of “the Brazilian family under the patriarchal economic regime” (Casagrande e senzala), this portrait of sixteenth-century settlers as uncompromisingly irreligious and sexually amoral predominated early twentieth-century Brazilian letters. Paulo Prado’s Retrato do Brasil [Portrait of Brazil] (1928), for instance, refers to the “astounding” and immeasurable “immorality of the first settlers,” their “unruliness and dissolution,” describing the “erotic overstimulation” (superexcitação erótica) ostensibly defining “the colonial experience in the first half of the sixteenth century” (1981, 34–35, 46). The locus classicus of this enduring myth of Portuguese colonization is the text Andrade later ranks among Brazil’s “totemic books,” Casa-grande e senzala (1991, 217). Echoing Prado, Freyre claims that, “the atmosphere in which Brazilian life began was one of near sexual intoxication, the European leapt ashore only to slide into naked Indian woman” (2003, 161). The role which this inaugural interracial “romance” played in the process that Stuart Schwartz denominates ethnogenesis (1996) was not only a staple of Modernismo’s “cosmic race” narratives, but of dominant Brazilian constructions of race and identity widely disseminated since. To a substantial degree, these plausive accounts of ethnic and cultural hybridity embody what Laura Stoler calls “formulaic moral narratives,” whose plots (“at once too transparent and too opaque”) may epitomize either a redemptive “universal romance” or a “colonial tragedy” of sexual violence and exploitation (2010, xxii). Most of the trenchant critiques of these masculinist eulogies of foundational miscegenation—such as Angela Gilliam’s, who argues that they constitute a narrativization of white male privilege (1998, 65) that elides “the predatory sexuality that affected the lives of indigenous and Black women” (2003, 100)—would doubtless fall under the latter category. Rather than belabor Stoler’s pertinent point here, I should like to focus on the rhetorical conversion of what Gillam understands as a “disembodiment of women’s potential for power and authority in their own lives” (2003, 100), and Robert Young regards analogously as “the opposite of any form of contestation by the subaltern or oppressed [that] offers them no form of agency or means of resistance” (2006, 115). This “disempowerment” is turned precisely into a peculiar “form of agency.” Hence, Paulo Prado alleges coyly that, “in matters of love,” indigenous women favored European men, “perhaps for priapic considerations” (1981, 45). Freyre, too, portrays native women as willingly “giv[ing] themselves to European men in exchange for a comb or the shard of a mirror […] the more wanton [ardentes] rubbing themselves against the legs of those they took for gods” (2003, 161). Freyre contends, in fact, that the women’s “priapism with regard to white men” stems from their preference for the European male’s overactive libido (“they are always ready for coitus” [2003, 171]), and for their more endowed genitalia (“among certain peoples of color the genital organs are generally less developed than among white men” [170]). Given this coterminous discursive context, one may licitly wonder whether the “priapic foundation” of the “liberated humanity” rehearsed aboard El Durasno (Andrade 1971, 197) is indeed “anthropophagic.” Or, is it rather a modernist (or nativist) projection of the European conqueror’s unfettered sexual desire? Indeed, even the emancipatory anti-clericalism that both Oswald de Andrade’s novella and the Manifesto profess is part and parcel of this foundational romance, to borrow Doris Sommer’s familiar term. In keeping with this master narrative’s plot structure, Freyre relegates the Jesuit’s evangelizing mission to a sustained effort “to destroy, or at least castrate, every virile expression of an artistic or religious culture that went against Catholic morality” (2003, 178). As the Manifesto concurs, Anchieta aims at the “sublimation of the sexual instinct,” to impose a “clothed and oppressive […] missionary truth” upon the indigenized and oversexed Ramalho (1972, 19), the prolific patriarch who wanted only “to fornicate with lots of women, without rendering account to any priest” (Torero 2000, 103).

194

The “cannibal cogito”

As Whitehead writes of early modern representations of anthropophagy, the cannibal feast “became a scene of monstrous excess and an intense … atmosphere of casual and gruesome violence” (2010, 98).Vespucci, for instance, watches in horror as “the women [hacked a] Christian into pieces, and … roast[ed] him before our eyes” (1992, 89). Pigafetta attributes to an old woman’s gnawing (“like an infuriated bitch”) at her son’s slayer the origin of the cannibal ritual (1995, 10). The Brazilian accounts of amoral and intemperate sexual activity between indigenous women and European settlers reproduce the overt sexualization that Whitehead identifies in Theodor de Bry’s illustrations for the 1593 edition of Hans Staden’s True History. Whatever historical truth lies behind such kindred portrayals of indigenous women’s unbridled eroticism in the early decades of the colonial encounter, to ascribe to them a voracious sexual craving for European males is also to overturn and subordinate to a structure of male desire what Michel de Certeau has called “the Western phantasm” of the vagina dentata (1988, 233).9 Their improbable agency notwithstanding, indigenous women in modernist representations of the colonial encounter seem ironically to be relegated to the same subaltern position they allegedly occupied in precolonial Amerindian societies: “fathers … are the agents; and … mothers are no more than sacks … in which children are bred” (Anchieta 1933, 452). If, as a consequence of their unions with European settlers, Amerindian women acquire a semblance of agency, their role as “the physical basis of the Brazilian family,” as well as what Freyre designates their “social and economic usefulness” to Brazil’s colonization, is reducible to their domestic labor and procreative function (2003, 162, 185). According to Isabelle Combès, the metaphysical meaning of the “women’s part” in the anthropophagic ritual hinges likewise on their reproductive function. Although their consumption of human flesh allows them to transcend their human condition, it does so in an “original” fashion, different from that of the men (1992, 189). As Whitehead asserts, early modern illustrations of female cannibals dismembering the corpses of sacrificial victims depict practices that are “clearly marked as a male prerogative” (2010, 98).The ritual cannibalism women practice does not entail the “supreme form of spiritualization” that it represents for their male counterparts. For, unlike men, they cannot gain entrance into the mythical Land Without Evil after death. Combès conjectures nonetheless that through the ritual ingestion of human organs (the heart and lungs), and by virtue of the fact that they are the bearers of life, women come to occupy a privileged place “between humans and gods” (193). The mother in Oswald de Andrade’s construction of anthropophagic matriarchy may well occupy a “problematic place of alterity,” as Jáuregui contends (2012, 27). It may indeed constitute a seductive “simulacrum” (Castro-Klarén 312). In the end, however, while the subaltern place to which modernist anthropophagy consigns women may stray from “the path of Tupi thought” (CastroKlarén 312), it also resonates with the Tupi’s unequivocal patriarchal strain. Rather than answering with a categorical “no” the Manifesto’s fundamental question (“Tupy or not Tupy”), one ought perhaps to respond more cogently with an ambivalent “Tupi and not Tupi.”

Notes 1 All citations from the Manifesto are from volume 6 of Oswald de Andrade’s complete works [Obras completas]: Do Pau Brasil à Antropofagia e às utopias: manifestos, teses de concursos e ensaios. 2 For a more detailed engagement with Gumbrecht’s dismissal of the Manifesto antropofágico, see my, “‘Flat Carnivalesque Intention of Being a Cannibal’ Or, How (not) to read the Cannibal Manifesto” (2011a), or “Intenção Carnavalesca de Ser Canibal” (2011b). 3 In this way,Viveiros de Castro completely reverses Marvin Harris’s “materialist” thesis that the redistribution of meat from sacrificial victims could well have significantly increased the protein and fat content among the ritual’s practitioners (1991, 235).

195

Luís Madureira 4 Although the Cartesian reference seems evident enough here,Viveiros de Castro may also be nodding at the Manifesto’s (in)famous play on Hamlet’s ontological dilemma: “Tupy or not Tupy that is the question.” 5 Interestingly, for Darcy Ribeiro, the fact that the Tupi devoured rather than enslaved their prisoners stems directly from the rudimentary nature of their system of production: anthropophagy constitutes, therefore, “an expression of the relative backwardness of the Tupi peoples” (2009, 31). 6 Viveiros de Castro cites the phrase approvingly in his preface to Azevedo’s book (2016, n.p.). 7 Brazil, or “the land of palm trees” (from the combination of the Tupi-Guarani word for palm tree [Pindob] and rama [land or region]). 8 In Montoya’s text, which relates the Jesuit campaign in the Paraguayan province of Guairá, he is described more specifically as a “secular Spaniard” (“español seglar” [32]). 9 As Vespucci claims, “they showed themselves to be very desirous to copulate with us Christians” (64).

Works cited Anchieta, José de. 1933. Cartas: Informações, Fragmentos históricos e sermões (1554–1594). Edited by Afranio Peixoto.Vol. 3 of Cartas Jesuíticas. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilização Brasileira. Andrade, Oswald de. 1971. Memórias sentimentais de João Miramar. Serafim Ponte Grande. Vol. 2 of Obras completas. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilização Brasileira. ———. 1972. Do Pau Brasil à Antropofagia e às utopias: manifestos, teses de concursos e ensaios. Vol. 6 of Obras completas. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilização Brasileira. ———. 1991. Estética e política. Edited by Maria Eugenia Boaventura. São Paulo: Editora Globo. Arens, William. 1979. The Man-Eating Myth: Anthropology and Anthropophagy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bosi, Alfredo. 1992. Dialéctica da colonização. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. ———. 2007. História concisa da literatura brasileira. São Paulo: Cultrix. Boucher, Philip. 1992. Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and the Island Caribs, 1492–1763. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Callado, Antonio. 1982. A Expedição Montaigne. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira. ———. 2000. Quarup. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira. ———. 2004. A cidade assassinada. Edited by Ligia Chiappini. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira. Campos, Augusto. 1975. “Revistas re-vistas: os antropófagos.” Revista de Antropofagia (1928–1929), n.p. Facsimile edition. São Paulo: Editora Abril. Campos, Haroldo de. 1971. “Serafim: Um Grande Não-Livro.” In Memórias sentimentais de João Miramar. Serafim Ponte Grande.Vol. 2 of Obras completas, 95–117. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilização Brasileira. ———. 1981. “Da razão antropofágica: A Europa sob o signo da devoração.” Colóquio Letras 62: 10–25. Carvalho, Bernardo. 2006. Nove noites. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. ———. 2007. Nine Nights. Translated by Benjamin Moser. London: William Heinemann. Castro-Klarén, Sara. 2000. “A Genealogy for the ‘Manifesto antropófago’, or the Struggle between Socrates and the Caribe.” Nepantla:Views from the South 1 (2): 295–322. Combès, Isabelle. 1992. La tragédie cannibal: chez les anciens Tupi-Guarani. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. De Certeau, Michel. 1988. The Writing of History. Translated by Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press. Descola, Philippe. 2005. Par-delà nature et culture. Paris: Éditions Gallimard. ———. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fausto, Carlos. 1999. “Cinco séculos de carne de vaca: antropofagia literal e antropofagia literária.” In special issue of Anthropophagy Today?, edited by Jorge Ruffinelli João and Cezar Castro Rocha. Nuevo Texto Crítico 12 (23/24): 75–82. ———. 2001. Inimigos Fiéis: história, guerra e xamanismo na Amazônia. São Paulo: Edusp. Figueiredo,Vera Follain de. 1999. “Antropofagia: uma releitura do paradigma da razão moderna.” In special issue of Anthropophagy Today?, edited by Jorge Ruffinelli and João Cezar Castro Rocha. Nuevo Texto Crítico 12 (23/24): 235–242. Freyre, Gilberto. 2003. Casa-grande e senzala: Formação da família brasileira sob o regime da economia patriarcal. Recife, Pernambuco, BR: Global Editora. García Canclini, Nestor. 1995. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Translated by Christopher L. Chiappi and Silvia L. López. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

196

The “cannibal cogito” Gilliam, Angela. 1998. “The Brazilian mulata: Images in the Global Economy.” Race and Class 40 (1): 57–69. ———. 2003. “Globalization, Identity and Assaults on Equality in the United States: An Initial Perspective for Brazil.” Souls 5 (2): 81–106. Girard, René. 1989. Violence and Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 1999. “Biting You Softly.” In special issue of Anthropophagy Today?, edited by Jorge Ruffinelli and João Cezar de Castro Rocha. Nuevo Texto Crítico 12 (23/24): 191–198. Harris, Marvin. 1991. Cannibals and Kings:The Origins of Cultures. New York:Vintage Books. Hulme, Peter. 1986. Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797. London: Methuen. Jáuregui, Carlos A. 2008. Canibalia: canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y consume en América Latina. 2nd ed. Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert. ———. 2012. “Anthropophagy.” In Dictionary of Latin American Cultural Studies, edited by Robert McKee Irwin and Mónica Szurmuk, 22–27. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. ———. 2015. “Oswaldo Costa, Antropofagia and the Cannibal Critique of Colonial Modernity.” Culture and History Digital Journal 4 (2): 2–17. Larsen, Neil. 1990. Modernism and Hegemony: A Materialist Critique of Aesthetic Agencies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Latour, Bruno. 1991. Nous n’avons jamais été modernes: essai d’anthropologie symétrique. Paris: La Découverte/ Poche. ———. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2009. Sur le culte moderne des dieux faitiches suivi d’Iconoclash. Paris: Éditions La Découverte. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1961. Tristes tropiques. Translated by John Russell. London: Hutchinson & Co. Madureira, Luís. 2005. Cannibal Modernities: Postcoloniality and the Avant-Garde in Caribbean and Brazilian Literature. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ———. 2011a. “‘A Flat Carnivalesque Intention of Being a Cannibal’, Or, How (Not) to Read the Cannibal Manifesto.” Ellipsis 9: 13–33. ———. 2011b. “‘Intenção Carnavalesca de Ser Canibal, ou’ Como (Não) Ler o Manifesto Antropófago.” In Antropofagia Hoje? Oswald de Andrade em Cena, edited by Jorge Ruffinelli and João Cezar de Castro Rocha, 299–317. São Paulo: Realizações Editora. Méttraux, Alfred. 1950. A religião dos Tupinambás e a sua relação com a das demais tribus tupi-guaranis. São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional. Mignolo, Walter. 2000. Local Historie/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges and Border Thinking. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Montaigne, Michel de. 1999. Les Essais. Livre 1. France: Éditions eBooks. Montoya, Antonio Ruiz de. 1892. Conquista espiritual hecha por los religiosos de la Compañía de Jesus. Bilbao, SP: Imprensa del Corazón de Jesus. Nodari, Alexandre. 2011. “A única lei do mundo.” In Antropofagia hoje? Oswald de Andrade em cena, edited by Jorge Ruffinelli João and Cezar Castro Rocha, 455–483. São Paulo: Realizações Editora. Nunes, Benedito. 1972. “Antropofagia ao alcance de todos.” In Do Pau Brasil à Antropofagia e às utopias: manifestos, teses de concursos e ensaios.Vol. 6 of Obras completas, xi–liii. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Civilização Brasileira. Oliveira, Emanuelle. 1999. “O falocentrismo e seus descontentes. Por uma leitura feminista da antropofagia.” In special issue Anthropophagy Today?, edited by Jorge Ruffinelli and João Cezar de Castro Rocha. Nuevo Texto Crítico 12 (23/24): 261–272. Pigafetta, Antonio. 1995. The First Voyage Around the World (1519–1522): An Account of Magellan’s Expedition. Edited and translated by Theodore J. Cachey Jr. New York: Marsilio Publishers. Prado, Paulo. 1981. Retrato do Brasil: Ensaio sobre a tristeza brasileira. São Paulo: Instituição Brasileira da Difusão Cultural. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes:Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Revista de Antropofagia (1928–1929). 1975. Facsimile edition. São Paulo: Editora Abril. Ribeiro, Darcy. 1982. Utopia selvagem: saudades da inocência perdida: uma fábula. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira. ———. 1996. Diários índios: os Urubus-Kaapor. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. ———. 2009. O Povo brasileiro: A formação e o sentido do Brasil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Rincón, Carlos. 1999. “Antropofagia reciclaje, hibridación, traducción o: cómo apropiarse la apropiación.” In special issue of Anthropophagy Today?, edited by Jorge Ruffinelli and João Cezar de Castro Rocha. Nuevo Texto Crítico 12 (23/24): 341–356.

197

Luís Madureira Rocha, João Cezar de Castro. 1999. “Let Us Devour Oswald de Andrade: A Rereading of the Manifesto antropófago.” In special issue of Anthropophagy Today?, edited by Jorge Ruffinelli and João Cezar de Castro Rocha. Nuevo Texto Crítico 12 (23/24): 155–168. ———. 2011. “Uma teoria de exportação.” In Antropofagia hoje? Oswald de Andrade em cena, edited by Jorge Ruffinelli João and Cezar Castro Rocha, 647–668. São Paulo: Realizações Editora. Schwartz, Jorge. 1999. “De simios y antropófagos. Los monos de Lugones,Vallejo y Kafka.” In special issue of Anthropophagy Today?, edited by Jorge Ruffinelli and João Cezar de Castro Rocha. Nuevo Texto Crítico 12 (23/24): 5–19. Schwartz, Stuart B. 1996. “Brazilian Ethnogenesis: Mestiços, Mamelucos and Pardos.” In Le Nouveau monde, monde nouveau: L’expérience américaine, edited by Serge Gruzinski and Nathan Wachtel, 7–27. Paris: Éditions Recherches sur les Civilisations. Schwarz, Roberto. 1992. Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. Edited and translated by John Gledson. London:Verso. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1999. Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Staden, Hans. 2008. Hans Staden’s True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil. Edited and translated by Neil Whitehead and Michael Habsmeier. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2010. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule. Berkeley: University of California Press. Subirats, Eduardo. 1999. “Surrealists, Cannibals, and the Other Barbarians.” In special issue of Anthropophagy Today?, edited by Jorge Ruffinelli and João Cezar de Castro Rocha. Nuevo Texto Crítico 12 (23/24): 169–177. Torero, José Roberto and Marcus Aurelius Pimenta. 2000. Terra papagalli. Lisboa: Livros Quetzal. Vespucci, Amerigo. 1992. Letters from the New World. Edited by Luciano Formisano and translated by David Jacobson. New York: Marsilio Publishers. Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 1986. Araweté: Os deuses canibais. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor. ———. 2014. Cannibal Metaphysics: For a Post-Structuralist Anthropology. Edited and translated by Peter Skafish. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. ———. 2016. “Que temos nós com isso.” Preface. Antropofagia. Palimpsesto selvagem, edited by Beatriz Azevedo, n.p. São Paulo: Cosac Naify. Wagner, Roy. 1981. The Invention of Culture. Revised and Expanded Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whitehead, Neil. 1984. “Carib Cannibalism. The Historical Evidence.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 70: 69–87. ———. 2008. Introduction, Hans Staden’s True History: An Account of Cannibal Captivity in Brazil. Edited and translated by Neil Whitehead and Michael Habsmeier, xv–cvi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2010. “The Ethnographic Lens in the New World: Staden, De Bry and the Representation of the Tupi in Brazil.” In Early Modern Eyes, edited by Walter S. Melion and Lee Palmer Wandel, 81–104. Leiden: Brill. Wittgenstein, Ludwig von. 1986. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Young, Robert J.C. 2006. “O Atlântico lusotropical: Gilberto Freyre e a transformação do hibridismo.” In Gilberto Freyre e os estudos latino-americanos, edited by Joshua Lund and Malcom McNee. 99–121. Pittsburgh, PA: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana.

198

11 PRESUMPTIONS OF EMPIRE Relapses, reboots, and reversions in the transpacific networks of Iberian globalization John D. Blanco

The final scene of the recent Spanish movie Oro (dir. Agustín Díaz Yanes, 2017) pays enigmatic homage to the Europeans’ first arrival at the western edge of the New World, where sixteenthcentury explorer and conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa concluded his expedition across the Isthmus of Panama (now traversed by the Panama Canal) in 1513 (spoiler alert).The film follows the misfortunes of conquistador Martín Dávila: many of these experiences seem to draw freely from Balboa’s life and times (as well as those of López de Aguirre). Failing to find a legendary city where the buildings and streets were made of gold, the character Dávila and his lone surviving companion from the original expedition instead encounter a modest coastal hamlet whose adobe buildings contain sprinkles of gold dust; and when the sun sets across the Pacific, the town radiates a glow that has inspired the legend. Beyond this settlement lies the great ocean: looking very much like the ocean surrounding the Iberian Peninsula, from where Columbus had set sail at the end of the previous century. Faced with a “discovery” so unfathomable, so vast, so abstract, and—because it is so abstract—at once meaningless and full of promise, the protagonist endows it with the only meaning his imagination can provide: planting a stake with a flag into the shifting sand beneath him, and pronouncing the entire ocean to be under the exclusive jurisdiction of the Spanish Crown (see Figure 11.1). His self-reflexive stare at the camera intends to convey at once the presumption, absurdity, hubris, and Quixotesque nature of Dávila/Balboa’s claim. What network of laws and institutions, what archive of knowledge would dare cast a net so great as to encompass the unexplored remainder of the globe: enfolding it beneath a mantle of either Divine Providence, or universal monarchy, or both? And in the wake of the seeming impossibility of enforcing such a claim, what legacies of the undertaking would remain? These two questions inform the current literature and historiography of the Spanish Pacific between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Among these, I highlight four key concepts that link the voluminous reports, royal decrees, memoirs, and chronicles assiduously documenting the Spanish presence overseas. They are: (1) the attempted territorialization of the sea, embodied in fictions of a Terra Australis (great southern continent) and the doctrine of mare clausum; (2) the

199

John D. Blanco

Figure 11.1  Still from Oro (dir. Agustín Díaz Yanez, 2017): Dávila claims possession of the Pacific Ocean and all adjacent territories for the Spanish Crown.

deterritorialization and reterritorialization of regional economies spurred by the Iberian presence in the Pacific; (3) the changing role of missionaries with the decadence and relapse of millenarian aspirations and their concomitant instrumentalization as agents of “spiritual conquest”; (4) the counterpoint process of frontierization in the age of political centralization. These themes frame the exhaustion of the Spanish vision of conquest, as the dispersion of the military, economic, and religious forces into unconquered space would engender decadence and corruption at their furthest reach as well as new forms of life and society. The rhetorical and theological traces of these frames belie the withdrawal of an actual infrastructure and material basis of hegemonic claims in the Pacific. At the same time, however, the colonial legacy in its cultural and religious dimensions would initiate the transculturation and mestizaje of local communities negotiating the process of change and continuity in a space defined as much by a frontier politics as by a metropolitan one.1

Terra Australis, 1609: in lieu of an Ocean In Ángel Rama’s last, unfinished work La ciudad letrada (The Lettered City, 1984), the wellknown Uruguayan literary scholar and critic argued that the Spanish imagination envisioned the conquest in terms of the projection and insertion of European-style cities and names on a map (“like a checkerboard”) in which the Latin American continent appeared first as an empty page, terra nullis (17–29).The corresponding arrival of an army of priests, officials, and scribes—a lettered or literate class—to the Americas would gradually fill in the blanks with an imaginary order corresponding to those initial coordinates established by adventurers seeking El Dorado.2 Quite a different problem presented itself on the open sea, which was sighted by Spanish conquistador and explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa in 1513: a vast uncharted space during a time when the theory of Copernicus remained controversial, and seafaring explorers lacked the ability to fix longitudinal coordinates. Balboa’s arrival on the western edge of the hemisphere happened barely twenty years after Columbus’s first voyage across the Atlantic. In fact, the conquest of the imperial kingdom of the Aztecs by Hernán Cortés would not begin for another eight years [in 1519] following Balboa’s “discovery,” to be succeeded by Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition to circumnavigate the globe [in 1521] and the conquest of the Incan Empire by the Pizarro brothers in 1524. The contemporaneity of these events conveys a sense of the common history 200

Presumptions of empire

and culture shared by these men up to that point: what Reinhard Koselleck might call their “space of experience” and “horizon of expectation” in an age of radically changing perspectives about the world and universe (2004, 255–275). Yet that background, framed by a common experience and set of expectations, also helps to place in contrast the divergent paths of the “lettered city” on the terra firme of the Western Hemisphere and the (mostly) landless space between the Americas and Asia. The European imagination of this contrast can be glimpsed in the first published map of the Pacific in the 1589 edition of Abraham Ortelius’s Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (see Figure 11.2).3 Across the central space of the map we see the sprawling cursive script naming the Pacific Ocean, as well as its “common” designation as the South Sea. As if to compensate for this largely empty space, sprinkled with designations like the shallows (bajos) of San Bartolomeo (actually located off the coast of Peru!) and the still largely unmapped Mariana Islands [Ladrones], the mapmaker has the western coast of California (which occupies a full quadrant), as well as the western coast of the southern continent, crammed with names given by the Spanish explorers to their territorial possessions. In the southwest quadrant, the island of Papua, which had recently been christened Nueva Guinea by Spanish maritime explorer Yñigo Ortiz de Retez [in 1545], a similar motif prevails. And along the bottom of the map looms the mythical southern continent, Terra Australis, which philosophers from Aristotle to the late eighteenth-century British explorer James Cook believed to exist, some explorers going so far as to assert that the hypothetical continent could serve as a land bridge between the southern tip of South America and the archipelagoes of Southeast Asia.4 The epistemic “reassurance” of territories, whether these concern those areas named and claimed by Cortés, Francisco de Ulloa and Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo throughout the sixteenth century, or the postulation of an as yet undiscovered “hidden” southern land, serves to shrink the dimensions of the Pacific considerably. As DeLoughery observed, “[the trope of isolated islands] is striking because it highlights an ideological contraction of island space and time between the Atlantic and Pacific as a product of European expansion” (2007, 19). Into this diminished space fly the sails of Ferdinand Magellan’s flagship Victoria, with the inscription: It was I, O Magellan, who in circling the globe with sails unfurled, led [you] to your new-found strait. In its circumnavigation, by which I am rightly called Victory, are my sails become wings, my prize become Glory, my struggle become the sea. [Prima ego velivolis ambivi cursibus Orbem, Magellane novo te duce ducta freto, Ambivi, meritoque vocor VICTORIA: sunt mî / Vela, alae; precium, gloria; pugna, mare.] The Abraham Ortelius map captures at once both the originality of the historical moment when world perspectives were undergoing radical transformation—a veritable “marvelous real,” in the words of Cuban author Alejo Carpentier—and the profound unoriginality of the expectations these changes spurred in Spain. For what could be more unoriginal than the exploration of the Pacific and circumnavigation of the globe as an allegory of destiny in need of completion? In his posthumous work El gran Océano, Rafael Bernal, among other writers, traces the roots of this tendency to the simultaneity of the Conquest and “discovery” of the Pacific with the Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula under the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel of Castile (2012, 115). This sensibility informed the age of Spanish exploration from the beginning: from Columbus’s millenarian dreams of discovering the Promised Land; to the Franciscan Tomás de Mendieta’s conviction that the encounter with New World peoples augured the imminent end of time; to Fernando de Quirós’s belief that his “discovery” of the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific was the land of Ophir mentioned in the Bible. What is significant here is the superimposition of the 201

John D. Blanco

202 Figure 11.2  Maris pacifici, in Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum Orbis Terrarum.

Presumptions of empire

territorial conquest of the Iberian Peninsula upon the contemporaneous discoveries of the New World, as well as the Pacific. For the sea to be “conquered,” it had to be filled, lettered, with the same order or nomos that had applied to the newly conquered territories or land, beginning with the Iberian Peninsula.Yet in the wake of this impossibility, it had to be contained, bound, just as it appears on the Ortelius map (see Padrón 2009, 1–30). The presumed existence of a southern land in the South Sea seems to underline this perception of what William Schurz famously called “the Spanish Lake” (1934, 287–302). With this epistemology in place on a printed map, the Spanish insistence on regarding the Pacific Ocean as mare clausum, that is, a “closed sea” under the exclusive legal jurisdiction of the Catholic monarchs, seemed plausible. Curiously, the map also had the effect of converting an expectation that had taken on the solidity of a conviction (the future discovery of Terra Australis) into a quasi-experience. In 1609, pilot and ship captain Pedro Fernandes de Quirós, who had sailed first with Álvaro de Mendaña de Neira in search of Terra Australis in 1595, and again in 1605, was so convinced he had discovered the fabled land that he wrote a memorial to the king describing his discovery in some detail: “That hidden part covers a quarter of the entire globe, and large enough to fit the doubled size of all the kingdoms and provinces over which Your Excellency presides at present.” [Aquella parte oculta es cuarta de todo globo, y tan capaz que puede haber en ella doblados Reinos y Provincias de todas aquellas de que V.M. al presente es Señor.] (qtd. in Zaragoza 1880, v. 1: 218). Quirós goes on to narrate fabulous tales of Terra Australis’s diverse population, “who are eminently disposed to pacification, Christian conversion, and contentment” [han de ser facilísimos de pacificar, doctrinar y contentar] (qtd. in Zaragoza 1880, v. 1: 219); and who lived in a country where fruit grew easily and sources of meat (as well as silver, pearls, and gold) abounded (220–222). Quirós’s messianic Providentialism led him to identify and name the islands that his expedition discovered the Solomon Islands, after the islands mentioned in the book of Psalms around the figure of Solomon (Psalm 72:1–10 passim., King James Version 2020). The inversion of the space of experience and horizon of expectation for Spanish explorers like Quirós—to the degree that the imminent expectation of the discovery of a southern continent became the presumption of a fulfilled prophecy—testified to a radical disorientation in the coordinates that anchored the “four corners” of the world, and the attempt by Spanish explorers to grasp the new reality with expectations deriving from the old (see Marx 2015, 5). Was it any coincidence that Quirós styled himself as a “new Columbus?” Yet the fact that the mapping of the Pacific Ocean was radically changing the space of experience for the world, and that this space of experience conflicted with the understanding of the world framed by Spain’s original horizon of expectations, can be illustrated by the stark contrast between Quirós’s famous 1609 memorial and a short pamphlet written by the young Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius the same year, on the occasion of a dispute between the Dutch and the Portuguese (then united with Spain during the period of the Iberian Union [1580–1640]) over the seizure of a Portuguese vessel in the waters of Dutch ally, the Sultan of Johore. Called Mare liberum, the pamphlet describes a situation that later political philosophers would take as the basis for constructing a new international legal order: a situation in which large parts of the earth consisting of great bodies of water “cannot be made proper,” that is, belong to any sovereign or individual by right of seizure, possession, or occupation, precisely because the sea cannot by nature be seized, possessed, or occupied (Grotius 1916 [1633], 20). This assertion, and the short treatise that develops it, contain a series of corollaries that introduce an emerging spatial order: one organized not around the decipherment and fulfillment of past prophecies, but rather the assertion of an empirical fact upon which a wholly new horizon of expectations must be based (see Schmitt 2003).

203

John D. Blanco

Manila-Macao-Mexico, 1565: in lieu of a network With the death of Quirós, the Spanish age of exploration came to an end. Spanish monarchs beginning with Philip II increasingly faced the prospects of weighing Spain’s transoceanic claim to dominion, against the anticipated burden of overseas administration and the costs and accompanying dangers that a permanent base in or near Asia would certainly incur. In fact, the founding of Manila in 1571, which economic historians peg as a convenient date for considering the birth of a world economy, was not a foregone conclusion. After the failure of two previous expeditions to find a westward sea route to the Spice Islands and to colonize the Philippines, Philip II enjoined the Augustinian friar Andrés de Urdaneta, formerly a pilot and one of the few survivors of the 1526 Loaysa expedition, to accompany Miguel López de Legazpi in the conquest and colonization of the Philippines. Even after Urdaneta’s discovery of the eastwardblowing trade winds (or “westerlies”) across the Pacific, Legazpi remained doubtful Spain would ever find a foothold in the lucrative spice trade (predominantly pepper and cloves) controlled by the Portuguese and organized around trading routes in Goa, Malacca, and the port-city of Macao. Add to this the revolt of the Netherlands against Spanish rule, and the outlook for a permanent Spanish colony in the Philippine archipelago looked ever more improbable. It is Legazpi’s dual recognition of (1) the conspicuous number of Chinese traders in the major native settlements of the islands in the archipelago he has visited and (2) the popularity of silk as a commodity in the Philippines, with the prospect of securing a profit margin in the silk trade with China that would rival that of spices in the Moluccas among the Portuguese, that convinces the Admiral otherwise (see Chaunu 1962, 555–580). With the relatively new dependence of the sixteenth-century Ming Emperor on silver as the currency of the Middle Kingdom’s taxes and the abundant supply of silver being extracted from the Potosí mines in Bolivia and the mines in northern Mexico, the fundamental components of the enterprise we know as the Manila galleon (also called Não de China) were established.5 From 1590 to 1811, with few exceptions, the transPacific galleon route was officially traversed twice a year, with its westward cargo consisting primarily of “friars and silver” (a common expression of the period) and its eastbound cargo consisting mainly of silk, although luxury items as diverse as porcelain, Japanese lacquerware, ivory, and spices made their way to the Americas (see Ruiz Gutiérrez 2016, 171–278). Yet the identity of Manila as entrepôt and emporium, birthplace of the world economy and bastion of the Spanish presence in Asia, gives rise to several anomalies that contradict our common extrapolations of this city and the Spanish Pacific more broadly. Carlos Martínez Shaw and Marina Alfonso Mola (2014), as well as Serge Gruzinski (2010), for instance, consider how the establishment of Manila and the galleon trade became the catalyst for “the first,” Iberian globalization. Yet in stark contrast to the image of an expanding network, other economic historians have repeatedly insisted on the almost complete dependence of Spain’s fortunes on only one major yet limited circuit—the trade between Mexico and Manila—which was based primarily on the demand for silver in the Chinese economy (Flynn and Giráldez 1995, 201–221). This observation constitutes one of the key moments in the development of Andre Gunder Frank’s provocative thesis: “the entire world economic order was—literally—Sinocentric.... It was only the nineteenth-century Europeans who literally rewrote this history from their new Eurocentric perspective” (Frank 1998, 117; see also Pomeranz 2001, 194). This perspective of the galleon trade calls into question both the global pretensions of the Manila galleon trade, as well as the process John Phelan identified as the “(partial) Hispanization” of the Philippines” by reorienting world history around the Sinicization of the Philippines and the Pacific, which is highlighted by these and other writers; or specifically, Spain and Europe’s insertion and assimilation into a Sinocentric world economy.6 204

Presumptions of empire

We arrive here at a paradox. The consequence and corollary of the birth of world trade, as Gruzinski colorfully portrays it, is the encounter and mestizaje among peoples from the four corners of the world: half-coerced by what he calls “the Iberian mobilization,” or displacement of traditions through the legacy of conquest; and half-seduced by the enormous wealth and exposure to the world’s commodities through arbitrage trade and commercial capital. Every stopover and way station of the Manila galleon became a hub for illicit activity, from Ladrones Island (Guam) to the Californias in the Western Hemisphere, and involving peoples from all over the globe. But curiously (and conversely), this displacement or deterritorialization of traditions, epistemologies, and lifeworlds or “cosmovisions” in the wake of the Spanish encounter with the Amerindian and Pacific worlds obscures a corresponding struggle over the reterritorialization of improvised and ad hoc networks in the New World and Pacific involving divergent cultural identities and their corresponding spaces.7 On the American side of the Acapulco-Manila galleon trade, then, Mexican and Peruvian Creoles vied with peninsular Spanish “gachupines” in Manila and Seville over the financing and control of trans-Pacific commerce, even as the Crown unsuccessfully prohibited most forms of transoceanic trade among Spain’s overseas colonies with one another.8 Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the disregard for these laws manifested itself in the proliferation of contraband, corruption, and venality of government offices which, when combined with the expedient and convenient use of the law when advantageous, gave rise to what Mariano Ardash Bonialian (2012) calls a “semi-informal economy,” which supplied Chinese goods up and down the Pacific coast (259–365).9 This trade also accounts for at least three times the amount of silver crossing the Pacific than the official records of the Manila galleon show (Frank 144–145). It would only be a matter of time before the Creoles, buttressed by their ability to develop inter-regional trade and purchase the sale of government offices, would come to counsel the viceregal authorities on the art of governing Spain’s Amerindian subjects, and eventually, tie eighteenth-century ideas of enlightenment and freedom to a consciousness of their economic power and deeper cultural knowledge of the Americas.10 The Spanish establishment of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade, then, led primarily not to the consolidation and articulation of a Spanish trans-Pacific economic network, throughout the Americas, but rather the proliferation of alternative contraband, semi-informal networks that shaped regional economies closely tied to Creole identities. On the other side of the Pacific, a slightly different situation obtained, with both Mexican Creoles and peninsular Spaniards in Manila unsuccessfully resisting the encroachment of both the Chinese and the Portuguese, the latter of whom adroitly monopolize commercial relations with China through their rival entrepôt port-city of Macao.11 Spain’s attempts to restrict the Chinese control of trade resulted in the revolt and massacre of the Chinese community in 1603, which was followed by further Chinese revolts in 1639, 1663, 1686, 1762, and 1772 (Corpuz 2005, 1: 308–310). But in spite of these repressive measures, by the late seventeenth century the Chinese were not only responsible for the retail trade that supplied the Acapulco-bound galleons; they and their mestizo progeny were also responsible for the inter-provincial shipping trade throughout the archipelago (ibid.). As the history of corruption, fraud, contraband, and the proliferation of informal and semiinformal economies amply demonstrate, the projection of a Spanish economic network could not rest on mercantilist principles where monarchial and viceregal power were weak; nor could it rely on policies enforcing secrecy through the censorship of information about Spain’s overseas possessions.12 What name, then, can we give it? Are “Iberian mobilization,” “Sinicization,” and the birth of the transoceanic “semi-informal economy” of American Creoles exclusive, overlapping, or synchronized with the articulation of a network of trans-Pacific identities, ­cultures, and communities? 205

John D. Blanco

Hagåtña/Agaña, 1695: in lieu of Christianity Robert Ricard’s classic work The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico (1966 [orig. pub. 1933]) documents the foundation and spread of Christianity by the mendicant and missionary friar religious orders in New Spain between 1523 and 1572. More than any other work in recent memory, it popularized the term “spiritual conquest” as a shorthand way to describe both the complementarity and the tension that has always existed between the religious and worldly or “temporal” goals of Spain’s overseas conquests. However, a glance at the way the term conquista espiritual (and its cognates) were employed in the colonial period suggests a relatively late date in the appearance of this rhetoric. The term also seems to have been employed most frequently outside the major centers of Mexico (City) and Lima, i.e., in those areas untouched by the original Spanish conquest and considered either the frontier outskirts of Spain and Portugal’s dominion or the neighboring kingdoms of the Pacific—Japan, Paraguay, Chile, Guam, the Philippine archipelago, and even India and Tibet.This distinction is important because it highlights at once the frontier character of Spain’s trans-Pacific network and the perpetually incomplete, protracted nature of Spain’s claim to its overseas possessions. Finally, an understanding of just what the trans-Pacific spiritual conquest entailed recenters the mission as the frontier institution par excellence (pace Bolton). If we leave aside for a moment medieval conceptions of the Crown and Church as complementary orders united in the same ultimate goal of universal Christian salvation, as well as theories of Monarchia Universalis promoted by Renaissance writers like Tomasso Campanella and the anti-Machiavellian writers, the rhetoric of “spiritual conquest” seems to respond to a series of specific circumstances that obtained in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century. The anonymous Jesuit play (presented in the form of a colloquy) written at the turn of the seventeenth century, La conquista espiritual del Japón, seems to be an early use of the phrase (see García Valdés, in Arellano et al. (eds.) 2007, 35–57). This meaning of spiritual conquest as an extension of the “Iberian mobilization” in the aftermath of Spain’s overseas explorations and territorial claims came to encompass all areas of conflict in which specifically missionaries were called upon to restore or enforce Spanish ideas of peace and civil society [policía]. As it turns out, these areas represented much of the Americas and the Pacific between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as Portuguese India. These areas all had in common two immediate points of reference in the late sixteenth century. The first is Philip II’s attempt to consolidate and enforce the rights of royal authority and patronage of the Church and the project of evangelization overseas. Early enthusiasm for a more cooperative effort between the Pope and the Crown had soured considerably under the challenges of the Church’s ministers to the legitimacy of Spanish rule, the open conflict between the mendicant missionary orders in New Spain (beginning with Las Casas), and the diocesan prelates over the jurisdiction and privileges of spiritual authority. Add to this the vicissitudes of papal loyalty to the Church’s original concessions to the Crown (see Shiels 1961). Philip II’s response involved a threefold tactic: (1) reasserting and extending the right of royal patronage against the claims of the Church’s independent jurisdiction of authority, through the codification of those rights under Spanish law; (2) elevating and increasing the autonomy of the Council of the Indies to administer royal patronage of the Church overseas; and (3) reining in the autonomy of the missionary orders by extending more direct Crown control over the nature, scope, and direction of Christian conversion. The publication of the Spanish Council of the Indies’ De la governación spiritual de lasYndias (1571–1572) inaugurates Spain’s attempt to reassert the legitimacy of Spain’s possessions overseas, whose foundation would lie not primarily on the principle of conquest but rather that of conversion and colonial resettlement of Christian communities. 206

Presumptions of empire

The coincidence between the publication of De la governación spiritual de las Yndias, and “El Adelantado” Admiral Miguel López de Legazpi’s establishment of Manila in 1571, illustrates the degree to which the conquest of the Philippines and ensuing administration of the islands under Spain’s dominion depended on the explicitly political role of the missionaries (see Schwaller 1986, 253–274). Following the reassertion of the Crown’s authority over spiritual as well as temporal matters overseas, Philip II authorized the Royal Ordinances of Pacification and the Laying out of Towns [Ordenanzas para descubrimientos, nuevas poblaciones y pacificaciones, 1573]. In it, the Spanish king makes clear that the settlement of lands not already settled would take place not under the rights of conquest, as it had under the conquistadors, but rather the promise of Spanish government: Los descobrimientos no se den con títulos y nombre de conquista: pues habiéndose de hacer con tanta paz y caridad como deseamos, no queremos quel nombre, dé ocasión ni color para que se pueda hazer fuerza ni agravio a los indios. [Forbear that any titles and the name of conquest accompany any present and future discoveries: for insofar as the matter (of colonial settlement) ought to be conducted with all the peace and charity that we desire, we do not want the name (of “Conquest”) to give any occasion or excuse for using force or injury against the Indians]. (Charles Gibson, cited in Lamb, ed. 1995, 126 [translation modified]) The ordinances also outline the role of the religious in teaching the Indians how to live in a “civilized manner” [policía, lit. political or civil society], and sternly insist on the avoidance of conflict and theft of any Indian property on the part of the Spanish settlers (see Nuttall 1921, 743–753; Sheridan Prieto 2013, 61–90). The identification of the Spanish conquest of the Philippines and other Pacific possessions as a pacification rather than a conquest, then, owes itself to primarily this new principle of Iberian governance under Philip II.13 Yet given the prevalent frontier character of the New World and Pacific—the segregation of Spaniards and Indians into two “republics” with their attendant privileges and responsibilities, the concentration of wealth and Spanish settlement in cities or near the silver mines (Zacatecas and Potosí), the aforementioned mestizaje of Spaniards and Indians—the missions were in fact better known as zones of protracted war.14 The reference to endless conflict with the native peoples of the Americas and the Pacific begins perhaps with the “second conquista” or war between Spain and the Chichimecs of northern Mexico [1550–1590]. During this period, missionaries like Fr. Guillermo de Santa María (O.S.A.) begin to invoke the existence of a war that continues even after the stated goals of “population, pacification, and conversion” have been met—una guerra viva [a living war] (Sheridan Prieto 63–64). In a similar vein, in 1665 Dominican Fr. Hector Polanco (O.P.) describes the “living spiritual conquest” in the Philippines as a main reason why missionaries should not be subject to the authority of the king’s royal patronage: One cannot follow [the model of replacing missions with secular parishes] that obtains in Peru or Mexico, where for many years the Indians have been reduced to the Faith and in obedience to Your Majesty and the ministers in the tranquil and pacific possession of these Christian lands. In the Philippines the religious remain in a state of an ongoing [viva] spiritual conquest, hoisting high the banners of the Faith and Christian religion...and unless one attempts the reduction of these Indians with humility, patience, good temperament, example, and orthodoxy, the ferocity of their nature and customs will not be held in check, and they will destroy the Christian kingdoms already fashioned. 207

John D. Blanco

[no se siguen en el Perú y México en donde los Yndios ha muchos años que están reducidos a la Fe y obediencia de Vuestra Magestad y los ministros en quieta y pacífica posesión de las Christianidades. En Filipinas están los ministros en viva conquista espiritual, enarboladas las banderas de la Fe y Religión Christiana... [y] si no se tratara de reducir estos con humildad, paciencia, buen tratamiento, ejemplo y doctrina no se contuviera la ferocidad de su natural, y costumbres, y destruyeran a las Christianidades que ya están formadas]. (cited in Colín and Pastells 1904, 734–735, italics added) As if to emphasize his meaning, Fr. Polanco catalogs the many revolts and uprisings that have left the islands in a state of total ruin. “These Christian kingdoms,” he concludes, “need spiritual soldiers who will work without rest to assure their fealty to God and Your Majesty” [[A]quellas Christiandades...necesitan de soldados espirituales que trabajen sin descanso en ellas para assegurarlas para Dios y Vuestra Magestad (737)].The migration of the language of “conquest,” from a political to a spiritual realm, was employed by Frs. Santa María, Polanco and their contemporaries to argue against the interference of royal authority in the work of the missions (Colín and Pastells 739). Such insistence on missionary autonomy, however, did not preclude friar and Jesuit recourse to violent means to help enforce the pacification mission, as the case of Guam and the Mariana Islands demonstrates. While Ferdinand Magellan had claimed the island as a Spanish territory during his attempted circumnavigation of the globe in 1521, it was only in 1668 that Jesuits, under the leadership of Fr. Diego Luis de Sanvitores, undertook the “spiritual conquest” of the Ladrones Islands, which Sanvitores renamed the Marianas. With the outbreak of native resistance to the policies of so-called pacification, Christian conversion, and resettlement [reducción], Fr. Sanvitores was martyred. The ensuing Jesuit requests for military backup, however led to the assignment of military commander Damián de Esplana, who became notoriously corrupt; and between the forced reducciones or concentration of the populations in coastal towns, the ensuing outbreak of epidemics with every arrival of the Manila galleon to the Marianas, and the atrocities committed upon the hapless population by Spanish soldiers, the Chamorro people revolted in 1684 and laid siege to the Spanish fort town of Agaña for four months.15 Jesuit leadership of the mission quickly ceded to military punitive expeditions against rebels, the wholesale destruction of native villages originally under the protection of the Jesuits, policies of forced concentration, and “scorched earth” tactics employed by both Spanish military leaders and the Chamorro resistance. The transformation of Spain’s “spiritual conquest” in Guam and the Marianas into an old-fashioned conquest, with the Jesuits in tow, ravaged the islands for the next thirty years. In 1695, acting Governor General José Quiroga completed a last, brutal campaign against native resistance, and forced the rest of the population into concentrated settlements, further reducing the original 149 settlements to seven.16 One year before the 1684 revolt, Fr. Francisco García (S.J.) (1683) wrote an exemplum of Fr. Diego Luis de Sanvitores’s martyrdom, summing up the fruits of the spiritual conquest in the Marianas: The Christian Faith was planted in the Mariana Islands without arms, so that they would know about the law of peace.... But since the Devil, enemy of happiness of all souls, began to arm the Barbarians against the religious ministers, the conservation of the labor already begun necessitated...that Christ’s ministers go about with a soldier escort.... Such was the price of this spiritual conquest.

208

Presumptions of empire

[Plantóse la Fe en las Islas Marianas sin armas, para que se conociese que era ley de paz.... Mas como el demonio enemigo de la felicidad de las almas, empezó a armar los Barbaros contra los Ministros Evangélicos, fue necesario para conservar la labor comenzada...así los Ministros de Christo...anduviesen con escolta de soldados.... Ha sido precio en esta espiritual conquista]. (García 1683, 590) Could Fr. García have anticipated that the majority of the “55,000 Christians” by his estimate would be dead by the turn of the century?

Alta California, 1794: in lieu of a (vanishing) colonial subject An image taken from the major scientific expedition launched by the Spanish Crown between 1789–1794, the Malaspina Expedition (after its leader, Italian navigator Alessandro Malaspina), depicts the indigenous method of individual warfare among the natives encountered by the expedition in the Franciscan missions and near the Spanish garrisons established along the coast of “Alta California” (present day California: see Figure 11.3).17 In several strokes, the artist captures the four major options available to the indigenous peoples who confronted the encroachment of the Spanish presence on the west coast. Many natives, like the ones armed with bows and arrows in the image, initially resisted the establishment of the Franciscan missions. Where resistance proved impossible, some natives fled to the outskirts of the western frontier, which remained largely terra incognita while others succumbed, tacitly accepting the Spanish yoke of pacification. The fourth “option” is harder to define: it involves the fact that most cycled through a mixture or sequence of these options in the course of a lifetime, perhaps even several cycles. The image conveys what California mission society shared with all Spanish missions throughout the trans-Pacific region: namely, the perpetually incomplete and protracted nature of the conquest,

Figure 11.3  M  odo de pelear de los Indios de California, pencil sketch attributed to José Cardero (artist), ca. 1792. Instituto de Historia y Cultura Naval, Madrid (Spain).

209

John D. Blanco

which led to the constant collapse and reconstruction of the missions on the one hand, and on the other, the constant retreat of the natives to regions beyond Spanish reach.18 The discontinuity of the mission manifested itself episodically—in mission revolts and desertions, followed by search and recapture expeditions that brought runaway Christian neophytes back to the ­mission—as well as progressively, as evidenced by the gradual depopulation of the missions over the course of the eighteenth century due to a combination of disease epidemics, infant mortality, migration to the fort-towns or presidios established alongside the missions, and flight into the interior hinterlands of North America (see Jackson 1944, 65–143).19 This double movement has been conceptualized in several ways throughout the Pacific region—from John L. Phelan (1961)’s thesis on the “partial Hispanization” of the Philippines, to the revision of Phelan’s thesis by Rainer Buschmann, Edward Slack, and James Tueller (2014) to encompass the Pacific world under “Mexican,” or “archipelagic Hispanization.” Matthew Restall (2004) describes the presidio-mission dynamic as the process of protracted colonialism; and Ana Cecilia Sheridan (2013) has adopted the term frontierization to capture the back-and-forth expansion and contraction of Spanish authority in accordance with the “living war” it generated throughout its overseas kingdoms. The Pacific “Rim” constituted the arena and laboratory for these cycles, in which layers of discontinuous and uneven forms of cultural mestizaje and transculturation relapsed, reverted, or combined with translocal collaborations as well as conflicts vis-à-vis the Spanish presence. Fr. Francisco Palou (O.F.M.) served as presiding director of the missions in first, Baja California, and later Alta California [1768–1773]. He described the resentment and hostility against the encroachment of the Spanish coastal missions on native indigenous communities, which broke out in the 1775 indigenous revolt at the San Diego de Alcalá mission in a rhetoric that was by now familiar to the trans-Pacific missions: The enemy, [Satan] envious and resentful, no doubt because the heathen in that territory were being taken away from him, and because the missionaries, with their fervent zeal and apostolic labors, were steadily lessening his following, and little by little banishing heathenism from the neighborhood of the port of San Diego, found a means to put a stop to these spiritual conquests. (qtd. in Carrico 1997) Ignored by Palou and his brethren, however, are the dramatic shifts of power and influence among the European powers after the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). The intense rivalry between Bourbon France (to which Spain had been allied since the 1700 War of Spanish Succession) and England had ushered in a new age of exploration focused on the Pacific, for the discovery of trade routes and islands that could serve as filling stations for ships.20 Technological developments in instruments of sailing and navigation assisted in a series of circumnavigations and scientific explorations of the Pacific, among which stand out those undertaken by the British naval commander James Cook (1768–1780) and French navigator Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de la Pérouse (1786–1789?). In 1788, the British established a colonial settlement composed primarily of prison inmates, in New Holland—later renamed “Australia,” in honor (or parody) of the fabled Terra Australis. One year later, and on the side of the Western Hemisphere, British traders clashed with a new Spanish settlement in Nootka Sound (St. George’s Cove), which had been established that same year to repel the encroachment of Russian fur hunters and traders. An indirect consequence of this imbroglio was the Spanish Crown’s decision to officially relinquish its claims to exclusive sovereignty over the Pacific (in 1790). For the Spanish Crown and administration under enlightened “Frenchified” [afrancesados] councilors, the expansion of missions and garrisoned forts in the Alta California region entailed 210

Presumptions of empire

not so much the ongoing pursuit of a Renaissance world-view, but rather an attempt to occupy coastal lands under Spanish possession in order to preempt the expanding presence of France and England. The age of spiritual conquest was exhausted: no decision better illustrates this understanding than the Crown’s decision to expel the Jesuits from all the territories under Spain’s dominion between 1767–1768.21 By contrast, the Malaspina Expedition intended to solidify and build upon Spain’s territorial claims to the coast through the suturing of past claims of discovery and occupation with present scientific observations of the nature and the peoples of putatively Spanish lands—what Buschmann called the reconciliation of “revealed” (or archival) and “experienced” (or empirical) knowledge (2014, 154–187). While the stated goal of the expedition was to produce a maritime world atlas, based on surveys of the lands and littorals of Spain’s Pacific possessions, Malaspina was also directed to verify or disprove the questioned existence of a “Northwest passage” connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans by water; and to investigate the presence of the other European powers overseas. It is uncertain whether Malaspina’s surveys would have contributed significantly to the preservation of the Spanish presence in the Pacific; or if his studies would have stimulated economic development through an in-depth survey and analysis of the coastal territories; or if they would have served the creation of a post-imperial network of commercial waterways. After all, the eighteenth-century revival of silver mining on the American continent, and the resumption of Chinese demand for silver bullion, provided some basis of optimism for Spain’s otherwise diminished status during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (see Flynn and Giráldez (2002, 405–410)). Infact, just prior to the 1789 expedition, Malaspina led the commercial circumnavigation of the world under the auspices of the newly formed but somewhat short-lived Royal Philippine Company [1785–1815], which aimed to counterbalance the opening of the Manila port to free trade by establishing a royal monopoly over the importation of Chinese and Indian goods.22 In any case, we will never know the effects of Malaspina’s fact-finding expedition: upon returning from his journey, he was charged with conspiracy against the Spanish Crown under state (prime) minister Manuel Godoy, and sentenced to ten years in prison. The results of his surveys, reports, and studies, which the government had intended to publish in a seven-volume edition, were instead confiscated and locked in a repository until nearly a century had passed (Spate 1983, 2: 177). After serving seven years of his ten-year prison term, he was released under petition of First Consul of the French Republic, Napoleon Bonaparte, and spent his few remaining years in Italy (d. 1810). Among the works he penned while in prison was an Enlightenment critique of Cervantes’s Don Quixote, in which he questioned the novel’s recognition as a literary epic on a number of grounds: most notably, the seeming absence of moral consequences to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza’s adventures for both the protagonists and their interlocutors (see Malaspina 2005 [1796]; and Manfredi, in Giménez, ed. 2006, 181–220). He may as well have written another treatise in a similar vein: this one critiquing a quixotic Spanish monarchy that had struggled for centuries to reconcile the past glories of territorial expansion and the promise of universal deliverance from the Enemy, with the creation of colonial societies that paradoxically expanded the area of frontiers and frontier society with every attempt to reduce it. But as fans of the Quixote can readily attest, the idea is everything.

Notes 1 See Gruzinski (2010, 44–48, 93); and Bernal (2012, 39–40). 2 For a recent critique of this imaginary, see DeLoughery (2007, 8–19). 3 See also Padrón (2009, 1–30). 4 For an account and analyses of the mythical Terra Australis, see Pimentel (2001), in Elizalde, Fradera, and Alonso, (2001, 2: 27–38).

211

John D. Blanco 5 In addition to Schurz (1934), see Chaunu (1960–1966), and Yuste López (1984). 6 See Bernal (2012, 237 and 501). See also Corpuz (2005, 1: 300–317). Corpuz mentions, among other things, that there were already twice the number of Chinese as Spaniards residing in the Philippines by 1590 (301); by 1768 they were estimated at about 20,000 (309). While their numbers went down with the decline and abolition of the galleon trade in 1811, the number of Chinese-Filipino mestizos went up steadily after 1760 (311). 7 For a more nuanced exploration of these ideas see Deleuze and Guattari (1980, 508–510). 8 These decrees were issued in 1591, 1593, 1595, 1604, 1609, 1620, 1634, 1636, and 1706. See Schurz (1934, 366–367). 9 See also Schurz (1934, 185–189, 369), Elliott (2007, 226–229), and Yuste López (2013, 185–105). On the Spanish transpacific slave trade involving Chinese and native Filipinos, see Seijas (2015). 10 See Elliott (2007, 226–229); also Brading (1991, 601–602), Alberro (1992, 13–26), and More (2012). 11 See Chaunu (1962, 555–580) and Seijas (2015, 32–72). 12 On Spanish reliance on European ignorance of the Pacific as virtually the sole protection of its overseas claims to possession, see Portuondo (2009, 103–140). 13 For an incisive contrast between the changing role of the missionaries in the New World vs. the Philippines, see Elizalde and Huetz de Lemps (2015, 185–220). 14 On the “myth of completion” of the Spanish conquest, see Restall (2004, 64–76). 15 See Hezel and Driver (1988, 140–141). Spate (1983) writes: “Sanvitores...might have been able to hold the military men in check; after his death the mission in effect was carried forward behind a creeping barrage of sheer terrorism.... [B]y early 1681, death and flight to the northern islands had so depopulated Guam that there were not enough people to raise supplies for the Galleons” (2: 115). 16 Spate (1983, 2: 117). In the most recent estimate, between 1521 and 1700 the island’s population fell by about two thirds—from between 24,000–28,000 to about 8,000. The Crown addressed the severe depopulation by resettling natives from the Philippines and Caroline Islands to staff the garrisons and forts and build the towns. 17 A reproduction of this and other images from the Malaspina expedition to California can be found in Cutter (1960). 18 See Jackson (1944, 37–38, 164–166). 19 For a comparative example of desertion, flight, and relapse of the missions in the Philippines, as well as figures on depopulation, see Corpuz (2005, 79–80 and 598–668); and Newson (2009, 9–99). 20 See Elizalde, in Elizalde, Fradera, and Alonso, (2001, 315–339). 21 The Jesuit missions in Baja California were transferred to the Franciscans as well as the Dominicans after the Jesuit expulsion. In sharp contrast to the attempted restrictions imposed by the Crown on missions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, here the missionary orders were given wide latitude in ministering to the “material and moral interests” of Christian converts: see Jackson (2005). 22 This initiative conflicted with the investment of Spanish colonists in the “semi-informal economy” established through and around the Manila galleon trade, and led to the demise of both the galleon trade and the Royal Philippine Company in the early nineteenth century.

Works cited Alberro, Solange. 1992. Del gachupín al criollo: o de cómo los españoles de México dejaron de serlo. Mexico City: El Colegio de México. Ardash Bonialian, Mariano. 2012. El Pacífico hispanoamericano. Política y comercio asiático en el Imperio Español (1680 –1784). Mexico City: El Colegio de México. Arellano, Ignacio, Alejandro González Acosta, and Arnulfo Herrera, eds. 2007. San Francisco Javier entre dos continentes. Madrid/Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert. Bernal, Rafael. 2012. El gran Océano. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Brading, David. 1991. The First America.The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State 1492 –1865. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. Buschmann, Rainer. 2014. Iberian Visions of the Pacific Ocean, 1507 –1899. London: Palgrave. Buschmann, Rainer, Edward R. Slack Jr., and James B. Tueller. 2014. Navigating the Spanish Lake:The Pacific in the Iberian World, 1521 –1898. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Cardero, José. Modo de pelear de los indios de California, 1792. Instituto de Historia y Cultura Naval, Madrid (Spain).

212

Presumptions of empire Carrico, Richard. 1997. “Sociopolitical Aspects of the 1775 Revolt at Mission San Diego de Alcala: An Ethnohistorical Approach.” Journal of San Diego History 43 (3): 143–157. http://sandiegohistory.org/ journal/1997/july/missionrevolt/. Chaunu, Pierre. 1962. “Manille et Macao, face a la conjoncture des XVIe et XVIIe siècles.” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 17 (3): 555–580. ———. 1960–1966. Les Philippines et le Pacifique des Ibériques (XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siècles), 2 vols. Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N. Colín, Francisco and Pastells, Pablo, SJ. 1904. Labor evangélica de los obreros de la Compañía de Jesús en las islas Filipinas, edited by Pablo Pastells, S.J., 3 vols. Barcelona: Imprenta y Litografía de Henrich y Compañía. Corpuz, O.D. 2005. Roots of the Filipino Nation, 2 vols. Quezon City (Manila): University of the Philippines Press. Cutter, David. 1960. Malaspina in California. San Francisco: J. Howell. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 1980. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. DeLoughery, Elizabeth. 2007. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. Elizalde, María Dolores. 2001. “Una defensa de la soberanía en el contexto del imperialismo: la colonización española de las islas Carolinas y Palaos.” Elizalde, Fradera, and Alonso, 315–339. Elizalde, María Dolores and Xavier Huetz de Lemps. 2015. “Un singular modelo colonizador.” Illes Imperis 17: 185–220. Elizalde, María Dolores, Josep M. Fradera, and Luis Alonso, eds. 2001. Imperios y naciones en el Pacífico. 2 vs. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Elliott, J.H. 2007. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492 –1830. New Haven: Yale University Press. Flynn, Dennis O. and Arturo Giráldez. 1995. “Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571.” Journal of World History 6 (2): 201–222. ———. 2002. “Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity through the Mid-Eighteenth Century.” Journal of World History 13 (2): 391–427. Frank,  Andre Gunder. 1998. ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. García Valdés and Celsa Carmen. 2007. “La conquista espiritual del Japón: Comedia Jesuítica Javeriana, y la perspectiva Paulina de la evangelización.” In Ignacio  Arellano,  Alejandro González Acosta, and Arnulfo Herrera, 35–57. García, Francisco. 1683. Vida y martyrio de el venerable padre Diego Luis de Sanvitores, de la Compañía de Iesvs. Madrid: Por Juan García Infanzón. Gibson, Charles. 1995. “Arrival and conflict: conquest and so-called conquest in Spain and Spanish America.” In Lamb, ed. 111–130. Giménez, Enrique, ed. 2006. El ‘Quijote’ en el Siglo de las Luces. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante. Grotius, Hugo. 1916. The Freedom of the Seas or The Right which Belongs to the Dutch to Take Part in the East Indian Trade. Translated by Ralph Van Deman Magoffin. New York: Oxford University Press. Gruzinski, Serge. 2010. Las cuatro partes del mundo. Historia de una mundialización. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Hezel, Francis X., and Marjorie C. Driver. 1988. “From Conquest to Colonisation: Spain in the Mariana Islands 1690–1740.” The Journal of Pacific History 23 (2): 137–155. Jackson, Robert H. 1944. Indian Population Decline: The Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1687 –1840. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ———. 2005. Missions and the Frontiers of Spanish America. Scottsdale: Pentacle Press. Koselleck, Reinhart. 2004. Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Translated by Keith Tribe. New York: Columbia University Press. Lamb, Ursula, ed. 1995. The Globe Encircled and the World Revealed. Aldershot, Hampshire, UK:Variorum. Malaspina, Alessandro. 2005 [1796]. Carta sobre el Quijote. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante. Manfredi, Dario. 2006. “Un ensayo cervantino de Alejandro Malaspina: La carta crítica sobre el ‘Quijote’ y el análisis de Vicente de los Ríos.” In El Quijote en el Siglo de las Luces, edited by Enrique Giménez, 181–220. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante. Martínez Shaw, Carlos and Marina Alfonso Mola. 2014. “The Philippine Islands: a vital crossroads during the first globalization period.” Culture & History Digital Journal 3 (1): e004. http://dx.doi.org/10.3989/ chdj.2014.004.

213

John D. Blanco Marx, Karl. 2015. Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Translated by Saul Padover. https://www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf. More, Anna. 2012. Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Newson, Linda. 2009. Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines. Honolulu: University of Hawai’I Press. Nuttall, Zelia. 1921. “Royal Ordinances Concerning the Laying out of New Towns.” Hispanic American Historical Review 4 (4): 743–753. Ortelius, Abraham. 2020. Maris Pacifici. 48x33 cm. “Wikipedia Commons.” 1589. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ortelius_-_Maris_Pacifici_1589.jpg (Accessed July 27, 2020). Padrón, Ricardo. 2009.“A Sea of Denial:The Early Modern Spanish Invention of the Pacific Rim.” Hispanic Review 77 (1): 1–27. Phelan, John L. 1961. The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565 –1700. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Pimentel, Juan. 2001. “Viajes, experimento y metáfora: Quirós, Cook y el doble descubrimiento de la quarta pars incógnita,” in Elizalde, Fradera, and Alonso, eds., v. 1: 27–38. Pomeranz, Kenneth. 2001. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Portuondo, María M. 2009. Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Psalm 72: 1 (King James Version). 2020. Bible Gateway. https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/? search=Psalm+72%3A1-19&version=KJV. Web. Rama, Ángel. 1984. La ciudad letrada. Montevideo: Arca. Restall, Matthew. 2004. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ricard, Robert. 1966. The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523 –1572.Translated by Lesley Byrd Simpson. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ruiz Gutiérrez,  Ana. 2016. El galeón de Manila (1565 –1851). Intercambios culturales. Granada: Editorial Alhulia. Schmitt, Carl. 2003. Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of Jus Publicum Europaeum. Translated by G. L. Ulmen. New York: Telos Press. Schurz, William Lytle. 1934. The Manila Galleon. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co. Schwaller, Joseph. 1986. “The Ordenanza del Patronazgo in New Spain, 1574–1600.” The Americas 42 (3): 253–274. Seijas, Tatiana. 2015. Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sheridan Prieto, Cecilia. 2013. Fronterización del espacio hacia el norte de la Nueva España. Mexico City: CISEAS. Shiels, W. Eugene. 1961. King and Church.The Rise and Fall of the Patronato Real. Chicago: Loyola University Press. Spate, O. H. K. 1983. The Pacific Since Magellan,Vol. 3. London: Croom Helm. Yuste López, Carmen. 1984. El comercio de Nueva España con Filipinas, 1590 –1785. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. ———. 2013.“De la libre contratación a las restricciones de la permission. La andadura de los comerciantes de México en los giros iniciales con Manila, 1580–1610,” in Un océano de seda y plata. El universo económico del Galeón de Manila, edited by Salvador Bernabéu Albert and Carlos Martínez Shaw. 85–106. Zaragoza, Don Justo, ed. 1880. Historia del descubrimiento de las regiones austriales hecho por el general Pedro Fernández de Quirós,Vol II. Madrid: Imprenta de Manuel G. Hernández.

214

12 IMPERIAL TENSIONS, COLONIAL CONTOURS Jesuits, slavery, and race within and beyond the Portuguese Atlantic Hugh Cagle

Stray cases Were it not for their unusual Atlantic itineraries, neither Miguel García nor Gonçalo Leite would be of much interest to historians. The basic outlines of their careers are as unremarkable as those of most of the other Jesuits who fanned out across Portugal’s empire in the latter half of the sixteenth century. García was a professor of theology at the Jesuit college (colégio) in Bahia from 1576 to 1583. Leite arrived in Brazil in 1572, where he became the first professor of philosophy at the college until he returned to Portugal in 1586. Like so many of their contemporaries in those years, the two Jesuits quickly staked out positions opposing enslavement of the native peoples of the Brazilian littoral. García criticized even his own missionary order for its dependence upon a “great multitude of slaves” (a multidão de escravos) (Leite 1938, vol. 2, 227).1 Leite went so far as to refuse to confess slave owners, whom he denounced as “murderers and thieves” (com muitos casos acêrca de cativeiros, homicídios, e muitos agravos) (Leite 1938, vol. 2, 228). This, of course, was a stance that earned Jesuit missionaries the ire of other Portuguese colonists, especially plantation owners, and led to charges and counter-charges of corruption, conspiracy, and immorality. At least in its general outlines, this story is well known even to colonial historians outside of the relatively small community of specialists in early Brazilian history (e.g. Alden 1969; Castelnau-L’Estoile 2000). But what distinguished the cases of Miguel García and Gonçalo Leite was that, under pressure from the Portuguese Mesa da Consciência e Ordens (the “Board of the [Royal] Conscience,” which oversaw ecclesiastical affairs), the two men were soon recalled to Iberia. García returned to his native Spain where, according to one leading Jesuit historian, he disappeared from the historical record altogether. Leite returned to Portugal three years later, was posted to the Jesuit College of São Roque in Lisbon, and cared for the diseased and infirm until he died of plague in 1603 (Leite 1938, vol. 2, 227–228). Their removal from the colony was a stunning reversal. García and Leite were parts of an emerging strategy meant to resolve a serious threat to the Jesuit mission in Brazil. Throughout

215

Hugh Cagle

Portugal’s empire—but especially in Portuguese America—the Society of Jesus confronted a severe shortage of personnel. Acrimonious debate among leaders of the Brazilian mission had given way by the early 1570s to a possible solution. Colonial colleges would be created not only to educate the sons of wealthy Portuguese settlers but also to serve as boarding schools for the recruitment and education of native children. From among both of these groups, some young men would be selected for Jesuit service, sent to universities in metropolitan Portugal for further education and possible ordination, and then returned to the colony as members of the Society (Cagle 2018, 189–190). The entire plan hinged, of course, on staffing colonial colleges with priests and professors like García and Leite. So why would the Society of Jesus recall personnel vital to its Brazilian mission? The problem was not simply that García and Leite opposed the practice of Indian enslavement but that they objected to the practice of slavery altogether—for both natives and Africans alike. And they did so on very specific grounds. Theirs was a technical objection to the way in which slavery was practiced. As they knew from their own university education, a corpus of theoretical writing on the concept of just war outlined the circumstances in which a person could be reduced to slavery—namely: upon capture in wars waged in defense of the Christian faith, wars begun only after opportunities for peaceful political submission and Christian conversion had been refused. Then and only then was enslavement licit (Russell 1975, 127–212, 267–268, and 271–291; Muldoon 1979, 3–28, and 55–126; Bennett 2003, 31–50). Once enslaved, the two parties—owners and bondsmen—were enjoined in a relationship of reciprocal but unequal obligation. In Portuguese America, slaves were to faithfully do their master’s bidding; masters were to adequately house and feed their slaves and, in cooperation with local clergy, ensure their moral and spiritual edification. It was this question of the circumstances of enslavement that so preoccupied the two Jesuits. And it was precisely this issue that García drew attention to in an impassioned letter to his superiors in Rome: “I cannot believe,” he wrote frankly, “that they [slaves in Brazil] have been licitly obtained” (Leite 1938, vol. 2, 227) (de maneira nenhuma posso tragar, maxime, por não poder entrar no meu entendimento serem lìcitamente havidos). What made their objections so troubling to contemporaries on both sides of the Portuguese Atlantic was not only that they had questioned the practice of slavery but that they had done so just as Atlantic slavery itself was undergoing an important transformation—one that proved to be of world historical importance (Blackburn 1997; Thornton 2012). The trade in enslaved African persons had been integral to Atlantic seaborne commerce since at least the fifteenth century (Green 2013). Free and enslaved persons of African descent had participated in the settlement of Brazil from its beginnings. But it was only in the early 1580s, that African slaves became the primary source of colonial manual labor and began to outnumber indigenous slaves in the cane fields and sugar mills that turned the Brazilian northeast into a profitable sugar colony. As that happened, the heated arguments between Jesuits and sugar planters over access to Indian labor had finally begun to subside (Schwartz 2004, 158–200). Indeed, Jesuit leaders then and later argued for the use of African slaves as a substitute for natives—and hence as a solution to the problem of native enslavement. African subjugation underwrote Native American conversion. By the time García left for Lisbon, even the Jesuit college of Bahia in which he lived and worked now owned some seventy Guineans (Alden 1996, 509). The vociferous condemnations of García and Leite threatened to reignite the conflagration, destabilizing an increasingly profitable colonial enterprise. The two Jesuits were silenced as part of a pragmatic arrangement between the Society, the Portuguese Crown, and sugar interests on both sides of the Atlantic. These two stray cases of Jesuit dissent—what little I have found of them—pose larger questions about Jesuits, slavery, and race than may at first be evident. They challenge even the basic contours of the history of slavery in the Iberian Atlantic. They highlight the persistent 216

Imperial tensions, colonial contours

limitations of comparative studies of slavery.They point to the possibility of histories of dissent within the Society of Jesus. And they call into question the adequacy of the Atlantic framework itself.

Departures Until recently, questions of race and slavery have been preoccupied with the origins question: an explanation of the emergence of forms of social stratification predicated on claims of essential, innate human difference. One of two dominant approaches is a cultural one, which characterizes works as distinct as Winthrop Jordan’s influential White Over Black and James Sweet’s more recent essay on “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought” (Jordan 1968; Campbell and Oakes, 1993; Sweet 1997). Jordan was concerned primarily with the English experience. But he had argued influentially that English approaches to colonial labor and attitudes toward persons of African descent were learned from the Iberian, and especially from the Spanish, example. James Sweet’s argument similarly tied racial attitudes in the Americas to Old World interactions. In medieval Iberia, Sweet contended, Spaniards and Portuguese acquired an essentialist vision of persons of sub-Saharan descent as a consequence of their experience under Islamic rule and through their interactions with Muslim slave traders in Islamic North Africa. For Sweet it was from the broader Islamic world that Catholic Iberians learned to see subSaharan peoples in general as a culturally and intellectually degraded form of humanity. As micro-historical accounts that took seriously both culture in general and cross-cultural interactions in particular (between the English and the Spanish in the Atlantic, and between Spaniards, Portuguese, and Muslims in Iberia), these contrast sharply with the other dominant approach to the emergence of race-thinking as it was connected to slavery, which is macrohistorical, largely structural, and variously focused on combinations of status, class, mode of production, and competitions for land and labor (Russell-Wood 1982; Blackburn 1997; Eltis 2000; Wolfe 2001). While these latter tend to pay too little attention to culture, approaches like those of Jordan and Sweet are not entirely convincing either. Interactions between slaving nations and among different regimes of slavery on both sides of the Atlantic were surely important for the formation of notions of bodily difference in the colonial Americas. But in their handling, colonial perspectives seem over-determined by attitudes exchanged among a narrow range of Old World peoples—between Englishmen and Spaniards or between Spaniards and Muslims. Such approaches also tend to sideline earlier encounters and interactions involving other Christian slave-trading nations in the Mediterranean (e.g., Verlinden 1970; Constable 1998; McKee 2004), as well as those later between Europeans, Africans, and New World peoples in American colonies (e.g., Restall, ed. 2005). Much recent work taking a cultural approach has also tended to rely on dubious assumptions about culture itself. Complex attitudes about identity and human difference are taken to have remained intact through time, across regions, and among distinct human communities. This approach allows far too little room for contingent cultural formations, cultural translation, and the creative invention, reinterpretation, or reconfiguration of ideas in the face of unforeseen colonial exigencies (Gruzinski 2002; Falola and Childs, eds. 2004; Matory 2005). Racism itself has too often appeared as a trans-historical ­phenomenon—a set of attitudes that passed intact from one group to another. More recently, historians and other scholars have begun to use carefully contextualized encounters and interactions to highlight the multiple and fragmentary character of historical notions of human difference and nascent ideas of race (Gruzinski 2002; Martínez 2008; Gómez 2017).They have explored the ways in which enslaved and otherwise marginalized persons have appropriated, deflected, redirected, redefined, or otherwise manipulated the classificatory 217

Hugh Cagle

impulses of Iberian colonial regimes (Bennett 2003; Owensby 2008; Rappaport and Cummins 2012; Ramos and Yannakakis, eds. 2014; McKinley 2016; Aidoo 2018). And they have documented the diachronic shifts and marked inconsistencies that characterized the ways that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century clerics themselves began to racialize concepts like slavery and freedom (Mattos 2006; Hill 2017; Nemser 2018). The cases of García and Leite bear on both sets of issues—the still-important question of race-making and of the ever-shifting boundaries of slavery and freedom in colonial Latin America. This is in part because they also open questions that have seemed more or less settled. First among these is the legal framework through which Africans and the indigenous peoples of Brazil were attached to the Portuguese colonial state. The medieval elaborations of a just war theory may have helped form the legal basis on which both Africans and Native Americans were incorporated into Iberian Atlantic empires. But there were important differences in those slave regimes too—differences that now sustain distinct scholarly literatures even within the field of Brazilian colonial history. The legal issues surrounding the enslavement of sub-Saharan African peoples were presumed to have been settled during the period of West African exploration in the fifteenth century— long before the colonization of Brazil. At the urging of members of the ruling Portuguese House of Aviz and after lengthy inquiries by specialists of both canon and civil law, Pope Eugenius IV issued a succession of bulls legitimating Portuguese military-cum-commercial pursuits in the Kingdom of Fez (Morocco). Beginning with the bull Rex regum issued on September 8, 1436, interest in legitimating a Christian conquest in North Africa inaugurated the process by which legal rhetorics drawn from Roman, canon, and natural law were variously brought to bear on African persons in Morocco and beyond, constituting the enslaved African subject (Bennett 2005). Although slavery had been formally inscribed into Iberian law in the thirteenth century with the siete partidas (the Castilian legal code based on Roman law), the arrangement promoted by members of the Portuguese House of Aviz and sanctioned by the  pope made slavery the primary pathway for the Catholic conversion of African peoples. Because the bull used the more capacious language of “Africa” (in Africanis partibus) and because it did not distinguish between pagans (who did not yet know Christianity) and infidels (who did but who refused to convert and who actively challenged Christian sovereignty), the bull could be interpreted, geographically, to include not only the Kingdom of Fez but the Canary Islands, and West and sub-Saharan Africa. And indeed the Portuguese and others managed to expand the papal remit so that inhabitants from those places all became susceptible to enslavement (Sweet 1997, 157–159; Russel 2000, 153–161 and 249–251; Bennett 2003; Mattos 2006, 43–55; Green 2013, 75–76; Muldoon 1979). The legal basis for the inclusion of indigenous South American peoples into Portuguese colonial society in Brazil differed. Although there were examples of critics, such as the New Christian and sometime Dominican Fernão de Oliveira, who questioned the application of the just war framework (Oliveira 1555), there was no Portuguese analog to the well-known Las Casas-Sepúlveda exchange in Valladolid in 1550 by which the Spanish Crown put the humanity of New World peoples on trial, legitimated native subjugation, and secured its claims of sovereignty in the Americas. Portuguese policies toward Brazil’s native peoples took shape more slowly, less formally, and partly as a consequence of countless ad hoc arrangements. Papal support for Iberian endeavors in the New World and hence the legitimacy of Iberian claims in the Americas rested in part on conduct toward, and the ultimate conversion of, native peoples (Shiels 1961). But unlike the Portuguese practice in sub-Saharan Africa, Portuguese policies toward the indigenous peoples of Brazil were not conceived in terms of a religious crusade; nor was slavery intended to be central to the relationship (Marchant 1942; Schwartz 1985; 218

Imperial tensions, colonial contours

Braga-Pinto 2003). The earliest surviving records reveal that the Portuguese Crown had proscribed the practice of enslavement of Tupí-speaking peoples by dyewood traders stationed along the Brazilian coast. The royal posture of non-involvement effectively permitted the practice nonetheless. Indian enslavement began immediately and spread rapidly, especially in the wake of wars against the Caeté during the 1560s, under the governorship of Mem de Sá. But when the Portuguese king Dom Sebastião finally promulgated an official Indian policy in 1570, a whole array of labor arrangements—slavery least favored among them—were conceived as pathways to political, economic, and cultural integration (Marchant 1942; Kieman 1973; Schwartz 1978; Johnson 1987). From the outset, then, while Catholic authorities and Portuguese promoters of African campaigns envisioned slavery as the principal pathway for the conversion of sub-Saharan peoples, and it was as slaves that they were intended to be integrated into the Catholic communities of Portugal’s American colonies, the same was not true for the indigenous inhabitants of Portuguese America. Much more than any other single institution in colonial Brazil, the Society of Jesus was central to the perpetuation of that difference.Within about a decade of their arrival in 1549, Jesuit missionaries had begun to acquire and deploy their influence to argue for native resettlement, missionary tutelage, and the integration of índios through labor arrangements that included slavery but which emphasized the creation of free village-based communities (aldeias) of devout subjects of the Crown. To mitigate the enslavement and attendant abuse of the predominantly Tupí-speaking peoples of the Brazilian littoral, the Jesuits vigorously promoted the importation of African slaves. Although in practice Crown support was inconsistent, the Jesuits were prime beneficiaries of the formalized Indian policy finally enacted by the Crown in 1570. Jesuits became the guarantors of indigenous well-being, and necessary intermediaries between Portuguese and native communities. Hence the issue raised so dramatically by García and Leite: from the Jesuit point of view, Amerindian enslavement was supposed to raise questions that African enslavement did not. García and Leite refused that distinction. By attempting to bring the enslavement of African and Amerindian peoples into the same legal frame, García and Leite collapsed not only the distinctions that their contemporaries drew and which ultimately underwrote the divergent historical experiences of inclusion and exclusion in Portuguese America. They also collapsed the distinctions that continue to sustain separate historiographies (but see, for example, Restall, ed. 2005; Langfur 2006). The cases of García and Leite do, however, suggest alternative approaches to Atlantic slavery. As an example of the ways in which religion impinged on the practice of slavery, they present an unusual challenge to the well-known Tannenbaum thesis. According to Frank Tannenbaum, the Iberian legal tradition combined Roman law (the siete partidas) and Church canon law in ways that endowed slaves with a legal and moral personality, and that in turn mitigated against the most severe abuses of chattel slavery and the most rigid forms of race-based social stratification (Tannenbaum 1946). Like the original formulation, most critiques of the Tannenbaum thesis set Anglo-American and Iberian American examples against one another (Degler 1971; Blackburn 1997; Sweet 1997; Landers 1999). The cases of García and Leite serve as reminders that distinct legal frameworks for forced labor could and did emerge side by side simultaneously—not only under the same colonial regime but within the same colonial colleges, urban households, and rural plantations. Clearly, blanket accounts of Iberian law and comparisons across European empires predicated on formal religious and legal differences alone are insufficient to account for the development of disparate regimes of Atlantic slavery. Then there are issues related to the characterizations of the Jesuit order and the geographical frameworks that continue to bound historical analysis. The silencing of García and Leite 219

Hugh Cagle

suggests that there remain untold histories of dissent within the Society of Jesus. Jesuit attitudes toward slavery, so the literature tends to suggest, were more or less uniform. Historians of the Society (then and now) have tended to marginalize or even disregard dissent. The Jesuit historian whose work has preserved what remains of the lives of García and Leite, for example, dismissed their views as mere attempts to gain personal notoriety. He suggested that it was because of their personal ambition, which was anathema to the collective enterprise of the colonial mission, that the two dissidents were removed from the colony (Leite 1938 vol. 2, 227–229). Other historians have stressed the forging of an ideological alignment between Jesuits and planters (Mörner 1967; Sweet 1978; Vainfas 1986). Such treatments take dissent as the exception rather than the rule. Indeed, this image of members of the Society strictly adhering to a monolithic Jesuit “way of proceeding” is such a fixture in the literature that Jesuit historian John O’Malley foregrounded a critique of the idea in his otherwise uncontentious study of the Society’s early years (1993, 7–9). More recently, the inescapable diversity of Jesuit perspectives on slavery has led scholars to eschew reductive treatments of the supposed force of patristic writings (such as those of St. Augustine or Thomas Aquinas) in determining Jesuit attitudes toward African enslavement (e.g., Costigan, ed., 2005). Not only did dissent clearly characterize Jesuit efforts to accommodate the practice of slavery but a wider Atlantic frame, taking in (for example) the views of Alonso de Sandoval at the Jesuit college in Cartagena several years later, suggests that the cases of García and Leite were neither aberrant nor isolated at all (Morgan 2000; Olsen 2004; Germeten 2008). Rather, they participated in a wider discourse on African enslavement that variously critiqued and accommodated the practice throughout the Atlantic. A comprehensive intellectual history of African slavery within the Society of Jesus remains to be written. But it will have to grapple with the diversity, rather than uniformity, of perspectives. Of course, Jesuit missions were not merely an Atlantic phenomenon. Instead, especially in Portugal’s empire, the Asian apostolate was more prestigious. It was the preferred destination for outbound Jesuits. Indeed, it was the draw of Asia—its riches, its populous cities, its perceived cultural and political sophistication—that made Atlantic destinations pale by comparison, and which made native recruitment, colonial colleges, and professors like García and Leite so crucial to a successful Brazilian mission in the first place. Once diverse intellectual currents within the Society begin to come into focus, it is worth asking whether the Atlantic is even the appropriate scale at which to look for answers. After all, even though slavery was not as central to Portuguese and other European empires in Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (but see Chatterjee and Eaton, eds. 2006; Seijas 2014), it is still true that Jesuit leaders worked within— and were sensitive to—the wider imperial horizons of their metropolitan patrons. And just as the Portuguese Crown wrestled with the possibilities and limitations of its empire, so too did wellconnected, policy-minded Jesuits attempt to reconcile Crown and missionary ambitions. Jesuit approaches to slavery in the Portuguese Atlantic were perhaps sensitive to the shifting fortunes of the empire globally. Understanding slavery in Portuguese America might require a perspective larger than the Atlantic itself. The question of slavery is just one way in which the Asian theaters of Portuguese empire might have become important to Atlantic possibilities. Even though my aim is to chart global interconnections, I suggest that, methodologically, culture and representation remain critical starting points. Even though large-scale global studies have tended to downplay, ignore, or outright dismiss cultural specificities in favor of institutions, macrostructures, and the longue durée, cultural representations remain useful because, among other things, they provide clues to the grounds on which groups interacted with one another. Representations are indices of both highly local ambitions and the preoccupations of individual participants in an encounter; but they also reflect the wider structural relationships of which they were a part and the cultural fields in which they were enmeshed. Carefully contextualized 220

Imperial tensions, colonial contours

representations can be used to link distinct levels of analysis (Adas 1998). Through them, global histories can be made sensitive to locally situated ideologies of race, gender, and religion among many others (Burbank and Cooper 2010; Bethencourt 2014 are efforts to reconcile culturalist and structuralist approaches). In the remainder of this essay, I undertake a close analysis of Jesuit rhetoric and pay particular attention to representations of the master-slave relationship. I do so to ask not whether and why the Society of Jesus supported the development of divergent forms of forced labor in Brazil (pace Tannenbaum and his interlocutors) but to ask on what terms they did so and how and why those terms changed over time. García and Leite had clearly failed to navigate the fraught terrain of Portuguese imperial political economy.The charged environment in which the two Jesuits operated and the grounds of their removal from the colony amount to clues that can help link the contingencies of the empire and the particular conditions that enabled or foreclosed missionary discourse in Brazil. The examples of García and Leite raise sweeping historical and historiographical issues. But these questions are too big for their cases alone to answer. To understand the interplay between structures, ideas, and agency requires an historical member of the Society whose influence and whose cognizance of the imperial context in which he and the Society operated might be more easily established. Through the life and work of the Portuguese theologian, diplomat, and missionary Antônio Vieira (1608–1697), it is possible to demonstrate not simply how Catholic missionary orders collaborated in African enslavement and the construction of Atlantic slave societies but also (and more interestingly) how, why, and on what grounds powerful individuals might attempt to insinuate themselves and their organizations into the master-slave relationship—and what, if anything, Portugal’s empire in Asia had to do with it.

The case for Vieira Born in Lisbon but raised in Brazil,Vieira was an influential diplomat and missionary who was equally at home in the court circles of metropolitan Europe and in the company of powerful indigenous headmen at the mouth of the Amazon River. Vieira would become a prolific author—eight volumes of his sermons circulated throughout the Atlantic world when he died in 1697—and he remains one of the central Portuguese literary figures of the seventeenth century. Particularly to specialists of the Spanish Americas,Vieira may be best known as the author to whom Sor Juana responded in a letter that would lead to her own fall from favor (Juana Inés de la Cruz 2009 [1690]). His rise to prominence was meteoric. In 1626 and still a neophyte, his superiors selected Vieira to author the Jesuit Annual Letter from Brazil. By 1630 he had begun to teach courses in rhetoric in the Jesuit College at Olinda. At the end of Spanish dominion over Portugal and its empire in 1640, Brazil’s viceroy dispatched Vieira as part of the delegation sent to assure the new king of the colony’s trust and obedience.Vieira soon gained the support and confidence of Dom Joao IV, delivered sermons to elite circles at the Portuguese court when he was named court preacher in 1644, and traveled to Holland and France in 1646 and 1647 as an envoy to negotiate a peace with the Dutch, who continued their assault on Portugal’s extraterritorial holdings. He was the architect of an extremely controversial plan to exchange Pernambuco for a lasting peace with the Dutch; and he opposed metropolitan Portugal’s support of its colonists’ revolt against the Dutch in Pernambuco in June of 1645. Among Vieira’s most contentious proposals was the creation of the short-lived Brazil Company, which relied on New Christian and Jewish financiers to revitalize trade with the Brazilian northeast (Hanson 1981, ch. 6; Cohen 1998). In Brazil,Vieira was instrumental in making the Amazon a focus of the Society’s missionary fieldwork and, between 1653 and 1661, he effectively consolidated the position of the Jesuits in 221

Hugh Cagle

the region as mediators between unconverted indigenous and colonial Catholic communities. In 1659 he arrived on Marajó Island at the mouth of the Amazon River, where Indians had thwarted repeated Portuguese attempts at armed conquest, and brokered the peaceful submission of forty thousand of the so-called Nheengaíba Indians to Jesuit control. The next year in Ceará, Vieira led the conversion of the formerly Dutch-allied Tapuia to Catholicism, bringing them under Jesuit tutelage as well. He had championed legislation promulgated in 1655 that placed Indian laborers of the Amazon under Jesuit administration. By 1660, the Jesuits claimed to have settled nearly 200,000 Indians into 54 aldeias scattered throughout lower Amazonia (Hemming 1984, 173–180; Cohen 1998, 155–173). Vieira was keenly aware of the performative aspects of both writing and speaking, and he frequently combined his roles as statesman and preacher. During the War of Restoration against Spain (1640–1668), he repeatedly lobbied the clergy, nobility, and lower classes of metropolitan Portugal to sacrifice on behalf of their resource-strained kingdom (Hansen 2000, 446). In Brazil, when the Society came under attack from Jorge de Sampaio, the powerful attorney of Maranhão, Vieira was the author of the lengthy Resposta aos capítulos que deu contra os religiosos da Companhia (“Response to the allegations given against the members of the Company [of Jesus]”), which detailed and defended at length Jesuit accomplishments in Brazil (Cidade and Sérgio 1951–1954, vol. 5, 174–315; Boxer 1963, 14–19; Cohen 1998, 54–118). Given his close connections to the Portuguese court, his prominence in discussions of imperial strategy and political economy, and his influential role in missionary fieldwork, it mattered that Vieira was one of the most outspoken advocates of African slavery in Brazil and of Portugal’s continued slaving in West Central Africa. His letter to the Marquis of Nice in 1648 summed up his point of view. “Without negros,” Vieira wrote, “there is no Pernambuco and without Angola there are no negros” (sem negros não há Pernambuco, e sem Angola não há negros) (Azevedo, ed. 1925–1928, vol. 1, 234). His many letters to officials in both the colony and Europe frame his decision in just those terms (e.g., Cidade and Sérgio, eds. 1951–1954, vol. 3, 712–714). Yet Vieira always felt, too, that enslaved persons of African descent were a possible constituency for Jesuit missionaries. As a young Jesuit, he believed the Society was responsible for converting both South American and African peoples. In addition to the three standard vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to God,Vieira also elected to take additional vows, pledging himself to missionary work among New World indigenous peoples and Africans alike. He studied both Tupí-Guaraní and Kimbundu. To Vieira, the conversion of both groups was an integral part of the Society’s global mission and an extension of the work of conversion that, as Vieira well knew, engaged Jesuit energies from Angola to India and China (Azevedo, ed. 1925–1928, vol. 1, 455–464; Cidade and Sérgio, eds. 1951–1954, vol. 5, 299, 308, 318; Boxer 1963). To that end,Vieira delivered a small number of sermons directly to African slaves—members of the Black confraternity of Nossa Senhora do Rosário—and their masters and overseers in the colony. Here I am concerned with two of these.Vieira preached the “Sermão décimo quarto” in Bahia on St. John the Evangelist’s Day (December 27) of 1633. He wrote and delivered the second sermon, the “Sermão vigésimo sétimo” sometime in the late seventeenth century (Alves, ed. 1907–1909, vol. 11, 255–286 and vol. 12, 301–334 respectively). Close reading of these texts reveals how an influential Jesuit missionary wrestled with the complexities and internal contradictions both of Portugal’s vast American colony and also its empire. Most immediately, Vieira had to reconcile his role as a Jesuit charged with fulfillment of royal pretensions to the conversion of millions of Amerindians with his individual position as a Catholic missionary, which he took to entail the care for all human souls—which in Portuguese America included both Amerindian and African. 222

Imperial tensions, colonial contours

The “Sermão décimo quarto” and the “Sermão vigésimo sétimo” were profoundly sensitive to the changing economic, political, and social currents in the colony but, taken together, reveal as well how Vieira wrestled with the exigencies of global empire. Wealthy, powerful fazendeiros (colonial sugar planters) often viewed Jesuit policies as antithetical to their own economic interests and as a source of social, economic, and political tension in the colony. But these sermons illustrate the bare, if circumspect, acquiescence of one influential Jesuit to the exclusionary and violent colonial order. That did not mean that Vieira abandoned African slaves altogether, however. Ecclesiastical authorities regularly expressed concern that planters worried far too little for the conversion of their slaves. And Jesuits were often critical of the secular clergy who they believed were less than diligent in their catechizing efforts. A careful reading of Vieira’s sermons shows how an influential Jesuit might attempt to insinuate himself and the missionary Church into the master-slave relationship. What were African slaves’ obligations to their adoptive society and what were that society’s obligations to its newest, if most degraded, members? Who had authority over them and what were the terms and theoretical limitations of that authority? In other words, what problems did African enslavement pose for Portugal’s attempt to construct a devout Catholic colony in the Americas? Vieira’s answer to questions like these were in part a consequence of the combination of pragmatism, messianism, and sense of historical destiny that shaped so much of his thinking more generally (Cohen 1998). Indeed, it was this potent combination that allowed Vieira to reconcile the apparent contradiction in the Jesuits’ promotion of African but not Indian enslavement (Ricard 1961; Boxer 1963; Vainfas 1986; Cohen 1998). But Vieira’s views on the terms and conditions of African enslavement in Brazil were neither fixed nor one dimensional. Rather, they can be read collectively as a set of shifting, strategic attempts by one Jesuit to palliate sugar planters and imperial authorities and at the same time limit planter abuses and ensure the Catholic instruction and conversion of African and African-descended slaves. Of the multiple rhetorics available to Vieira he would consistently take as his starting point the obligations of reciprocity—enslavement in exchange for Christian salvation—that attended the masterslave relationship as it was inscribed in the now long-standing papal arrangements established for Portuguese Atlantic endeavors in the fifteenth century (Russell 1975, 162, 172–178). Yet Vieira’s formulation of that relationship and the place of the Jesuit missionaries within it changed over time. These shifts reflected the shifting political and economic fortunes of Portugal and its global—not just its Atlantic—empire.

Bodies, souls, empires By the 1610s, Africans and African-descended persons had supplanted indigenous communities as the primary source of slave labor along Brazil’s northeastern littoral (Alden 1969; Schwartz 2004). The colonial arrangement by which African subjugation underwrote Native American salvation grew more salient. Concerns about the place of forced African laborers within the Catholic Church and the place of the Church and its emissaries within the master-slave relationship deepened. In 1633, in the “Sermão décimo quarto,” Vieira attempted not only to reconcile the missionary project with the imperial exigencies that required Jesuits to accept African enslavement, but also to address questions about the place of enslaved Africans in the work of the missionary Church. Planters and other slave owners, as well as ecclesiastical authorities, often argued that enslavement was the price for salvation.Vieira’s perspective was similarly rooted in the obligations of reciprocity. But the theory of just war focused on a relationship of mutual obligation between masters and slaves: as slaves supported the material well-being of their owners so masters 223

Hugh Cagle

attended to the spiritual growth of their slaves. Vieira configured the arrangement differently. The crucial relationship—and hence the terms of reciprocity—was that which obtained between slaves and the Church. Masters were incidental to the salvation Vieira proffered, not the key to it.The nature of this relationship was familial rather than contractual. Labor in Brazil became a chance to pay a debt owed to God and especially to the Virgin Mary (Alves, ed. 1907–1909, vol. 11, 270–284). This was not a vision that minimized violence and suffering. To the contrary: violence and suffering were vital to the constitution of familial bonds. Vieira placed particular emphasis on ties that were either maternal (linking slaves to the Virgin Mary) or fraternal (linking them to Jesus Christ). Repeated recitation of the rosary during torturous days of labor at the mill became a central act of devotion to the Holy Mother and a way to continually reaffirm African and African-descended slaves’ commitment to—and belonging in—the broader family of the Church. Vieira similarly used violence and suffering to identify bonded laborers as brothers of Christ, in one of the most striking passages likening the daily brutality visited upon plantation slaves to the suffering of Christ on the cross. Earthly suffering through spiritualized labor in the engenho was a vehicle for veneration and a pathway for salvation. It characterized the experiences of Africans’ Holy brother and, like Christ, their suffering was their consecration (Alves, ed. 1907–1909, vol. 11, especially 275–276). In all of this,Vieira had to resolve an apparent contradiction between African slaves’ membership in the compassionate family of Christ and the violence which they suffered daily at the hands of fellow Christian masters and overseers. He did this by constructing a history in which suffering was normalized. It was part of a divinely sanctioned plan, a common earthly experience of the devout. Through biblical exegesis, Vieira explained that those who suffered most were also the most devout (Alves, ed. 1907–1909, vol. 11, 270). The sermon of 1633 was strategically timed and its message was pointed. In the face of dramatic economic dislocation—the calamitous Dutch capture of Pernambuco in 1630 (Schwartz 1985, 177–185; Schwartz 2004)—and in the midst of contentious relations between clergy and sugar planters—a situation in which planters’ care for the spiritual lives of their slaves was always found wanting by secular and missionary clergy alike—the 1633 sermon to slaves and planters constituted both a reminder of the importance of the conversion of African and Africandescended slaves and a case for the centrality of the missionary Church to that enterprise. By asserting the primacy of spiritual obligation and insisting upon thorough, formal indoctrination, Vieira created a place for Jesuit priests in the relationship between masters and their African slaves—indeed the role was enacted in the sermon’s very delivery. Jesuits were to have an active role not only in administering sacraments and ensuring the proper instruction of the rosary and its attendant meanings, but in policing the behavior of masters and slaves, and in explaining the new faith and elaborating an historical trajectory by which apparent contradictions were resolved. Events over the ensuing decades would force Vieira to reconsider that position. The 1630s turned out to be a point of inflection for Portuguese fortunes generally—not only in Brazil but throughout the empire—that inaugurated what Sanjay Subrahmanyam has described as a period of imperial “retreat” and which led to a reconfiguration of imperial political and economic interests that turned the Atlantic, rather than Indian Ocean Asia, into a focus of Crown policy. In the Atlantic, the Dutch captured and settled Pernambuco beginning in 1630, seized the São Jorge da Mina castle in 1637, and did the same to the slave port of Luanda in 1641. These in turn disrupted the slave trade to Brazil. In Asia, losses and other challenges were both numerous and costly. They included a decline in revenue from intra-Asian trade after the Mughal capture of Hughli in the Bay of Bengal in 1632, losses in Ceylon and the adjacent coast and the 224

Imperial tensions, colonial contours

attendant shrinkage of the Portuguese cinnamon trade, the periodic Dutch blockade of Goa, and increasingly restricted access to trade with the Japanese and the attendant collapse of silver trade for Portugal in 1639 (Subrahmanyam 1993, 164–180, 182–188). Consequently, by the 1660s, the Atlantic replaced the Indian Ocean as a focus of Portuguese imperial economic and administrative activities. Ships returning from Asia increasingly called at Salvador as private traders sold Asian drugs, spices, and especially textiles on their own accounts to make up for the money they could no longer make in Asia (an aspect of intra-colonial trade that was only legalized in 1672). Increasingly, too, outbound ships on the carreira da Índia stopped at Bahia to load powdered tobacco (for snuff) and sugar (for both alimentary and medicinal purposes) to be sold in Goa and Macau. All of this, according to Subrahmanyam, meant that that the Asian trade became “integrated with and perhaps even subsidiary to the trade to Brazil” (Subrahmanyam, 1993, 41; van Veen 2000; Strum, 2013). Vieira, who was in Rome in the early 1670s and who maintained vigorous epistolary exchanges with countrymen and contacts spread from London to Paris and Lisbon, was acutely aware of these transformations and the geostrategic maneuverings of competing empires in Europe and Asia that underlay them. In the same years, he advocated for imperial reform in response to these global challenges.Vieira was among a number of influential Jesuits who promoted the creation of a joint-stock company financed by New Christian merchants, supported by a new military force of some five thousand men-at-arms, and accompanied by a renewed missionary presence spread across the Estado da Índia. The proposal failed, signaling his diminished influence at the court of Prince Regent Dom Pedro. In 1681, in the wake of this defeat, Vieira returned to Bahia (Hanson 1981; Cohen 1998). Even after Portuguese colonial forces recaptured Pernambuco in 1654, the Brazilian sugar trade remained badly weakened. Pernambuco, its milling infrastructure and fertile lands badly damaged, would never recover. Bahia remained central to the colonial sugar economy, but efforts were now underway to invigorate sugar production in the northern regions of Grão Pará and Maranhão. Always poorer and less productive, and fed by the inland slaving of the bandeirantes, the region remained far more dependent on the labor of cheaper indigenous captives than on the more expensive enslaved Africans.Vieira promoted the slow but eventual shift from indigenous to African slaves and as early as 1669 penned a brief that detailed how the Crown might facilitate it. He proposed what in 1682 became the Companhia do Estanco do Maranhão, which was to supply the region with as many as six hundred African slaves per year. The Maranhão Company (like its predecessor the Brazil Company) was short lived and African would not supplant Indian slavery in the north until the mid-eighteenth century (Carreira 1983; Alden 1986). In April of 1680, before his departure for Bahia the next year,Vieira also secured confirmation from Prince Regent Dom Pedro that control of Indian labor in the Brazilian north remained in Jesuit hands. The Maranhao Company’s monopoly on (and lackluster performance in) the importation of African slaves combined with Jesuit control of Indian labor led to a rebellion among planters and their temporary expulsion of the Jesuits in 1684 (Baleno 2002). It was sometime in the early 1680s, in the midst of failure and setback, that Vieira wrote and delivered the second of his sermons to an audience of planters and slaves of the brotherhood of Nossa Senhora do Rosário. Like his earlier sermon of 1633, the “Sermão vigésimo sétimo” evinced an abiding concern for the spiritual well-being of African slaves. Yet, well aware that imperial fortunes hung substantially on the productivity of the Brazilian sugar trade, aware too of the impoverished and more precarious situation of colonial sugar planters, and sensitive to the unusually strained relations between the Society and northern planters, Vieira addressed the form and meaning of the master-slave relationship. He was both more explicit and more cautious. The sermon ultimately modified the vision he had proffered decades earlier. The “Sermão 225

Hugh Cagle

vigésimo sétimo” reallocated responsibility for African conversation and salvation. Anxious to promote the expansion of plantation agriculture and to avoid inflaming tensions with planters, Vieira articulated a vision that divested the African slave community of the evangelical efforts of the Jesuits, as well as of other colonial clergy. Vieira now placed responsibility for the spiritual lives of enslaved Africans entirely on the backs and in the hands of the slaves themselves. From the opening passages of the oration,Vieira was unflinchingly candid about the divergent material, bodily, and moral circumstances of the master and the slave. Highlighting vast disparities in this way set in high relief what Vieira saw as the depredations of planters as a group. It also focused attention on the relationship between the productivity of the bodily labor of the enslaved and the material prosperity that planters derived from it. And that, in turn, allowed Vieira to draw a sharp distinction between the body and the soul, and in so doing reemphasize the temporal authority of masters over their African slaves (Alves, ed. 1907–1909, vol. 12, 302–305). Of course, the distinction between body and soul was a deeply rooted feature of Catholic cosmology (Sweet 1978, especially 92; Mello e Souza 1993, 147–159). But in a colonial slave society on the frontier of Western Christendom, where the nascent commodification of human life threatened to give more power to secular authorities—and in which the Jesuit order and the secular clergy were continually at odds over authority for the spiritual life of African and African-descended laborers (Leite, ed. 1938)—this distinction could be made to do strategic rhetorical labor. For it meant that masters owned only one half of the African subject, that of the body (Alves, ed. 1907–1909, vol. 12, 305–306). Despite the slaves’ degraded status, preached Vieira to his late seventeenth-century audience, African and African-descended slaves themselves were in possession of their souls. The implications, at least rhetorically, were far reaching. It allowed Vieira to establish firm limits on what masters could and could not do to their bonded laborers. Masters owned—but also had the responsibility to care for—the flesh alone. Slaves owned—but also had the responsibility for—their souls. It was their duty to police their own comportment and to obey the Catholic precepts that could guarantee their own salvation. This meant that, first, some forms of slave resistance were thus deemed legitimate (Alves, ed. 1907–1909, vol. 12, 321). It also insinuated, second, that even as Vieira was unwilling to cede total dominion over African-descended slaves to their masters, he was now also unwilling to make the case for a more assertive role for the clergy in mediating that relationship.

Toward an imperial history of slavery and race in Brazil Vieira’s sermons serve not only as an index of the ways in which individual perspective, imperial tensions, and colonial exigencies all converged to produce highly particular, shifting formulations of the master-slave relationship in colonial Brazil. But, as Brazilian historians have long argued, the Society of Jesus was among the few colonial institutions powerful enough to manipulate the terms and metaphors with which colonial Brazilian society conceived of both slavery and human difference (Cardoso in Vainfas 1986, 10). A precise measure of Vieira’s influence on wider, societal notions of embodied human difference would be speculative and is beyond the scope of the present chapter. But the increasingly marginal place of African and Africandescended slaves as targets of missionary activity, as envisioned by Vieira, was entirely consonant with other shifts which, taken together, do indeed appear to point to a more sweeping transformation in race-thinking in Portuguese America in the late seventeenth century. According to Stuart Schwartz, it was precisely in this period of the late seventeenth century that those born in Brazil who claimed more illustrious peninsular heritage began to draw clear

226

Imperial tensions, colonial contours

lines of distinction between themselves and poorer Portuguese immigrants on the one hand and between themselves and Brazil’s now-expansive Black and mulatto populations on the other. He described this process as the “hardening . . . of racially based attitudes of hierarchy . . . [by which] the native-born colonists began to assume the role of nobility and to differentiate themselves from the rest of the population” (Schwartz 1987, 40). Schwartz drew particular attention to colonial efforts to construct genealogies linking prosperous colonial families to metropolitan, Old-Christian origins. A range of additional evidence has begun to emerge to support and extend Schwartz’s claim. This period, according to Laura de Mello e Souza, saw the demonization of non-Catholic rituals and greater ecclesiastical scrutiny (Mello e Souza 1993, pt. 2). And James Sweet has argued that, in this same period, as prominent whites increasingly but secretly participated in African divination and healing rituals, they simultaneously began to denounce them publicly—drawing connections between specific rituals like calundú and diabolical powers and satanic sympathies (Sweet 2003, 144–152). Economic disruptions of the period may have helped propel these processes of social and cultural segmentation. In Brazil, most sugar was provided to mill owners by smallholding cane growers (lavradores de cana). As Brazilian sugar became less profitable, countless members of the colonial population faced the prospect of downward social mobility. And that may itself have enhanced the appeal of claims to a privileged status rooted in descent and marked by color and cultural affiliation. Inasmuch as his sermons accommodated missionary divestment from the spiritual lives of persons of African descent and allowed for African slaves’ increasing marginalization within an idealized Catholic body politic, Vieira’s work not only implicated Jesuits in these broader transformations. They also reveal the ways in which imperial tensions, colonial contingencies, and individual perspectives combined to shape early modern race-thinking.

Note 1 This and all other translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

Works cited Adas, Michael. 1998. “Bringing Ideas and Agency Back In: Representation and the Comparative Approach to World History.” In World History: Ideologies, Structures, and Identities, edited by Phillip Pomper, Richard H. Elphic, and Richard T.Van, 81–104. Malden: Blackwell. Aidoo, Lamonte. 2018. Slavery Unseen: Sex, Power, and Violence in Brazilian History. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Alden, Dauril. 1969. “Black Robes versus White Settlers: The Struggle for ‘Freedom of the Indians’ in Colonial Brazil.” In Attitudes of Colonial Powers toward the American Indian, edited by Howard Peckham and Charles Gibson, 19–45. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. ———. 1986.“Indian versus Black Slavery in the State of Maranhão during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.” In Iberian Colonies, New World Societies: Essays in Memory of Charles Gibson, edited by Richard L. Garner and William B. Taylor, 71–102. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press ———. 1996. The Making of an Enterprise:The Society of Jesus in Portugal, Its Empire, and Beyond, 1540 –1750. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Alves, Gonçalo, ed. 1907–1909. Obras completes do Padre António Vieira. 14 vols. Porto: Lello and Irmão. Azevedo, João Lucio de, ed. 1925–1928. Cartas do Padre António Vieira. 3 vols. Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade. Baleno, Ilídio C. 2002. “Reconversão do comércio externo em tempo de crise e o impacto da companhia do Grão-Pará e Maranhão.” In História Geral de Cabo Verde, vol. 3, edited by Maria Emília Madeira Santos, 157–234. Lisbon: Instituto de Investigação Científica Tropical e Instituto Nacional de Investigação, Promoção e Património Cultural de Cabo Verde.

227

Hugh Cagle Bennett, Herman L. 2003. Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. ———. 2005. “‘Sons of Adam’: Text, Context, and the Early Modern African Subject.” Representations 92: 16–41. Bethencourt, Francisco. 2014. Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Blackburn, Robin. 1997. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492 –1800. London:Verso. Boxer, Charles R. 1963. A Great Luso-Brazilian Figure: Padre Antonio Vieira, S. J., 1608 –1697. London: Hispanic & Luso-Brazilian Councils. Braga-Pinto, César. 2003. As promessas da história: discursos proféticos e assimilação no Brasil colonial, 1500 –1700. São Paulo: Editorial da Universidade de São Paulo. Burbank, Jane, and Frederick Cooper. 2010. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cagle, Hugh. 2018. Assembling the Tropics: Science and Medicine in Portugal’s Empire, 1450 –1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Campbell, James and James Oakes. 1993. “The Invention of Race: Rereading White Over Black.” Reviews in American History 21: 172–183. Carreira, António. 1983. As companhias pombalinas: de Grão-Pará e Maranhão e Pernambuco e Paraíba. Lisbon: Editorial Presença. Castelnau-L’Estoile, Charlotte de. 2000. “Les ouvriers d’une vigne stérile”: Les jésuites et la conversion des Indiens au Brésil (1580 –1620). Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. Chatterjee, Indrani and Richard M. Eaton. 2006. Slavery and South Asian History. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cidade, Hernani, and António Sérgio, eds. 1951–1954. Obras escolhidas.12 vols. Lisbon: Livraria Sá da Costa Cohen, Thomas M. 1998. The Fire of Tongues: António Vieira and the Missionary Church in Brazil and Portugal. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Constable, Olivia R. 1998. “Muslim Spain and Mediterranean Slavery: The Medieval Slave Trade as an Aspect of Muslim-Christian Relations.” In Christendom and Its Discontents, edited by Scott Waugh and Peter Diehl, 264–286. Berkeley: University of California Press. Costigan, Lúcia, ed. 2005. Diálogos da conversão: missionários índios, negros e judeus no contexto ibero-americano do período barroco. Campinas: Editora UNICAMP. Degler, Carl N. 1971. Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Eltis, David. 2000. The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Falola, Toyin and Matthew D. Childs, eds. 2004. The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Gómez, Pablo F. 2017. The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Green, Toby. 2013. The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300 –1589. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gruzinski, Serge. 2002. The Mestizo Mind: The Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization. Translated by Deke Dusinberre. London: Routledge. Hansen, João Adolfo. 2000. “Guidelines for Reading Vieira,” translated by David Shepherd and Tania Shepherd. Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies 4–5: 446. Hanson, Carl A. 1981. Economy and Society in Baroque Portugal, 1668 –1703. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hemming, John. 1984. “Indians and the Frontier in Colonial Brazil.” In The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. II, edited by Leslie Bethell, 501–545. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hill, Ruth. 2017. “From Neophyte to Non-White: Moral Theology and Race Mixture in Colonial Brazil.” Journal of Early Modern Christianity 4: 167–193. Johnson, H.B. 1987. “Portuguese settlement, 1500–1580.” In Colonial Brazil, edited by Leslie Bethell, 8–29. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jordan, Winthrop D. 1968. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550 –1812. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Juana Inés de la Cruz. 2009 [1690]. The Answer/La Respuesta. Critical edition and translation by Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell. New York: The Feminist Press at The City University of New York.

228

Imperial tensions, colonial contours Kieman, Mathias C. 1973. The Indian Policy of Portugal in the Amazon Region, 1614 –1693. NewYork: Octagon. Landers, Jane. 1999. Black Society in Spanish Florida. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Langfur, Hal. 2006. The Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s Eastern Indians, 1750 –1830. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Leite, Serafim. 1938. História da Companhia de Jesus no Brazil,Vol. 2. Lisbon: Livraria Portugália. Marchant, Alexander. 1942. From Barter to Slavery: The Economic Relations of Portuguese and Indians in the Settlement of Brazil, 1500 –1850. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Martínez, María Elena. 2008. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Matory, J. Lorand. 2005. Black Atlantic Religion:Tradition,Transnationalism, and Matriarchy in the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Mattos, Hebe. 2006. “‘Pretos’ and ‘Pardos’ between the Cross and the Sword: Racial Categories in Seventeenth Century Brazil.” European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 80: 43–55. McKee, Sally. 2004. “Inherited Status and Slavery in Late Medieval Italy and Venetian Crete.” Past & Present 182: 31–53. McKinley, Michelle A. 2016. Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600 –1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mello e Souza, Laura de. 1993. Inferno Atlântico: demonologia e colonização, séculos XVI–XVII. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Morgan, Ronald J. 2000. “Jesuit Confessors, African Slaves, and the practice of confession in seventeenthcentury Cartagena.” In Penitence in the Age of Reformations, edited by Katharine Jackson Lualdi and Anne T. Thayer, 222–239. Burlington: Ashgate. Mörner, Magnus. 1967. “Los jesuitas y la esclavitud de los negros.” Revista Chilena de Historia y Geografía 135: 92–109. Muldoon, James. 1979. Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels: The Church and the Non-Christian World, 1250 –1550. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Nemser, Daniel. 2018. “The Iberian Slave Trade and the Racialization of Freedom.” History of the Present 8: 117–139. Oliveira, Fernão de. 1555. Arte da guerra do mar. Coimbra: n.p. Olsen, Margaret M. 2004. Slavery and Salvation in Colonial Cartagena de Indias. Gainesville: University of Florida Press. O’Malley, John W. 1993. The First Jesuits. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Owensby, Brian P. 2008. Empire’s Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ramos, Gabriela and Yanna Yannakakis. 2014. Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes. Durham: Duke University Press. Rappaport, Joanne and Tom Cummins. 2012. Beyond the Lettered City: Indigenous Literacies in the Andes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Restall, Matthew, ed. 2005. Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Ricard, Robert. 1961. “Prophecy and Messianism in the Works of Antonio Vieira.” The Americas 17: 357–368. Russell, Frederick H. 1975. The Just War in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Russell, Peter. 2000. Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’: A Life. New Haven:Yale University Press. Russell-Wood, A.J.R. 1982. The Black Man in Slavery and Freedom in Colonial Brazil. New York: St. Martins Press. Schwartz, Stuart B. 1978. “Indian Labor and New World Plantations: European Demands and Indian Responses in Northeastern Brazil.” American Historical Review 83: 43–79. ——— 1985. Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society, 1550 –1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ——— 1987. “Formation of a Colonial Identity.” In Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500 –1800, edited by Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, 15–50. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schwartz, Stuart B. 2004. “A Commonwealth within Itself:The Early Brazilian Sugar Industry, 1550–1670.” In Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450 –1680, edited by Stuart B. Schwartz, 158–200. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Seijas, Tatiana. 2014. Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

229

Hugh Cagle Shiels, W. Eugene. 1961. King and Church:The Rise and Fall of the Patronato Real. Chicago: Loyola University Press. Strum, Daniel. 2013. The Sugar Trade: Brazil, Portugal, and the Netherlands (1595 –1630). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1993. The Portuguese Empire in Asia, 1500 –1700. New York: Longman. Sweet, David G. 1978. “Black Robes and ‘Black Destiny’; Jesuit Views of African Slavery in 17th-Century Latin America.” Revista de Historia de América 86: 87–133. Sweet, James H. 1997. “The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought.” William and Mary Quarterly 54: 143–166. ——— 2003. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441 –1770. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Tannenbaum, Frank. 1946. Slave and Citizen:The Negro in the Americas. New York: Knopf. Thornton, John K. 2012. A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250 –1820. New York: Cambridge University Press. van Veen, Ernst. 2000. Decay or Defeat? An Inquiry into the Portuguese Decline in Asia, 1580 –1645. Leiden: Research School of Asian, African, and American Studies and CNWS. Vainfas, Ronaldo. 1986. Ideologia e escravidão: os letrados e a sociedade escravista no Brasil colonial. Petrópolis: Vozes. Verlinden, Charles. 1970. The Beginnings of Modern Colonization. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. von Germeten, Nicole, ed. 2008. Treatise on Slavery: Selections from De instauranda Aethiopum salute by Alonso de Sandoval, S.J. Translated and with an introduction, by Nicole von Germeten. Indianapolis: Hackett. Wolfe, Patrick. 2001. “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race.” American Historical Review 106: 866–905.

230

13 THE CARIBBEAN CONUNDRUM José Antonio Saco’s Hispanic archive and the Black Atlantic Eyda Merediz

Cuban intellectual, José Antonio Saco (Bayamo, Cuba 1797–Barcelona, Spain 1879) is a paradigmatic figure in nineteenth-century Cuba and the Hispanic Caribbean. Contrary to most countries in Latin America that achieved emancipation from Spain by 1824, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and also the Philippines had a long colonial history that only ended with the Spanish-American war in 1898.Thus, Saco remains a colonial author in a century of constant independence wars where nevertheless Cuba was widely known as the “ever-faithful isle” with racial complexities that David Sartorius has framed in terms of unexpected loyalties that allow for the persistence of empire (2013, 1–20). Saco is not only seen as a key actor in the rise of Cuban nationalism and cultural identity, but also as an important historian, writer, and polemicist who studied the institution of slavery from a national, regional, and transatlantic viewpoint as well as from a universal perspective. His critique of slavery was modified in accordance with a fluctuation of political allegiance that united Spain with its Caribbean colonies from one government to another; yet he maintained his adherence to a legal framework as a reformist. His theoretical approach to the Atlantic slave trade and the racial configuration of Cuba (including neighboring islands) similarly evolved through the years, often resulting in assessment of his thought as contradictory or insufficiently conceived. These critiques, most certainly, recall the acerbic criticism written about one of Saco’s most valuable historical and inspirational sources, Bartolomé de las Casas (1484–1566).

José Antonio Saco and his times Saco’s biography and the inventory of all his multifarious and dispersed writings have been amply documented and circulated from his first publications printed and compiled during his lifetime (1858) to other posthumous editions (1881, 1883, 1893), including the extensive commentary, editing, and reprintings by Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) in 1932 and 1938 and beyond (notably, the recent 2001 Clásicos Cubanos edition in Cuba and 2002 MAPFRE edition in Spain of Saco’s complete works). Saco continues to be integral to studies of Cuba and the Hispanic Caribbean, to the formation of a literary canon in the nineteenth century, the 231

Eyda Merediz

articulation of race and racial discourses, the sugar plantation, and the role of intellectuals in the process of nation-building (Figarola Caneda 1921; Fernández de Castro 1923; Ortiz 1929, 1938b, [1940] 1978; Moreno Fraginals 1960, 1978; Guerra 1970; Le Riverend 1979; TorresCuevas 1984, 2001; García González 2008; Gárciga in Saco 2012). Historical studies have capitalized on these topics not only in the national setting, but also in a transnational comparison with Puerto Rico and other islands. Similarly, Saco is studied within the context of a transatlantic fabric of ideas, texts, and debates that shaped liberal thought in the nineteenth century as well as the articulations of freedom and independence (i.e., Knight 1970; Paquette 1988; Pérez 1988; Naranjo Orovio and Puig-Samper 1990; Schmidt-Nowara 1999, 2011; Scott 2000; Gónzalez-Ripoll et al. 2004; Bergad 2007; Opatrny 2010; Naranjo Orovio and Buscaglia 2015; Zeuske 2016; Gónzalez-Ripoll 2017; Naranjo Orovio 2017). His writing has received significant attention not only in Cuba but among Hispanists in the European and North American academy for the vast topics covered: natural history, science, statistics, education, economy, literature, health, chemistry, philosophy, archeology, journalism, climatology, criminality, immigration, jurisprudence, technology, and other encyclopedic themes relevant to his epoch (GónzalezRipoll 2017, 149–150). As disciple of the revolutionary independent and abolitionist prelate Félix Varela (1788– 1853) at the San Carlos and San Ambrosio Seminary, Saco eventually became a philosophy professor after Varela left the seminary. At first,Varela had been chosen to be a representative to the Cadiz Constitutional Courts in Spain and shortly after he took a definitive exile in the United States. Ortiz sees Saco’s academic post as the start of his influential role in the education of young Cubans, something Varela himself had accomplished previously. Saco also influenced intellectual currents as the editorial director of the Revista Bimestre Cubana from 1932–1934 (published by the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País and founded in 1831). The time he spent in the US was also important because of his collaboration with Varela in the publication of a polemical liberal journal, El mensajero semanal (1828–1831), which was eventually prohibited from circulating in Cuba for what was perceived as airing a covert hostility toward Spain. When the infamous Miguel Tacón became Governor and Captain General of Cuba in 1834, Saco was exiled from Havana for his perceived dangerous ideas; he was banished to the town of Trinidad in the central region of the island. However, Saco instead chose to self-deport to Spain, the center of colonial power (Ortiz 1938a, xx). Ortiz best captures this gesture by emphasizing the motives for Saco’s journey to the root of absolutism, a means of “deflecting evil, correcting mistakes, insisting on justice, creating allies and … demanding respect” (“a desviar malevolencias, a vencer errores, a pedir justicias, a crear amigos, … a exigir respetos” 1938a, xx). Like Varela who lived out his life in exile and died in the United States, Saco died in Europe, after a brief and only visit spent in his beloved Cuba in 1861 (Ortiz 1938a, xvi). Saco, as part of the white Cuban criollo elite, was very much involved in constructing a nationalist project and a collective identity in the absence of a national state; this project could only be achieved through writing, that is, crafting a discursive Cuba (see Llorens 1998, 75). The question of Black slavery was central to his intellectual milieu and to any formulation of a cohesive national agenda in the Caribbean that, nevertheless, he imagined as a spectrum of increasing whitening. His consistent viewpoint in favor of suppressing the slave trade early in the century no doubt responded to the model inaugurated by Haiti of a sweeping revolution in which a Black majority was placed in power to the demise of the white masters. It also responded to the treaty signed by England and Spain in 1817 in which Spain was pressured to stop the trade from 1820 onward. Thus, Haiti served Saco as a cautionary tale for Cuba, with further confirmation found in the role that abolition played in the devastating North American civil war. The treaty of 1817 provided the legal bases that Saco would uphold until his death due to incongruencies 232

The Caribbean conundrum

between de jure and de facto practices. He lent his voice to reject the slave trade outright but his assessment of the institution itself was another matter (see Ortiz 1938b, 37–64).The case of Cuba with its particular history of indigenous and Black slavery in the Hispanic Atlantic took him down an ambiguous, meandering path that fosters polymorphous readings as Gónzalez-Ripoll’s analysis of the general use of “race” in Saco’s writings shows (2017, 153–161). In fact, his position, which is not progressive enough in light of current formulations of critical race theories, in his lifetime granted Saco a political reputation of being an advocate of independence from Spain, a sympathizer of annexation to the US, as well as an abolitionist traitor. Needless to say, Saco was thought a rebel, much to the surprise of Fernando Ortiz, as he wrote years later (1938a, xx), but Saco’s opinion against annexionism became indisputably clear (1848, 1850, 1853). There is no doubt that Saco was perturbed by the question of slavery. From his first publication about vagrancy in Cuba (1831) to his commentary on Notices of Brazil (1833), passing through his comparison between Cuba and English colonies (1837), his arguments to suppress the trade (1845) to his last text on slavery and the revolution in Spain (1868 and widely available in its French version of 1869; and included in 1881, 443–55), the centrality of the topic is clear. Indeed, he engaged in an ambitious multivolume project that traced the history of slavery and servitude from remote times until the early 1800s, with particular attention to the forms of indigenous slavery during the conquest and colonization of America as well as study of the origins and proliferation of the African slave trade during colonial times (three volumes appeared in 1875–1877 and one in 1879 while two others were published posthumously in editions reorganized and annotated by Vidal Morales y Morales in 1883 and 1893). In fact, his relevance to colonial studies stems from his investigation and insertion of the transatlantic slave trade of indigenous peoples from the Americas within a broader discussion about slavery, as analogous to the African slave trade but, significantly, in the direction of west to east or from one region to another across the Americas. Saco confesses on the first page of his monumental history that slavery was not something he researched in books but that he experienced first-hand because he was born among his parent’s slaves and eventually inherited a few briefly after their untimely death (1875, 1). The infamous institution permeated all sectors of society in Cuba, not only sugar and coffee plantations, but in small farms and urban settings. In later study researching historical accounts, Saco found the confirmation of what he calls the “poison” of slavery present in all human histories. In his practical assessment of Cuba’s economic and political condition he did not evolve towards the abolitionist path that Felix Varela eventually traced before him, although Varela’s position itself was limited by notions of security (Rojas 2013, 43; see Varela [1822] 1938). Instead, Saco shared the ideas of patrician reformers from Western Cuba such as Francisco Arango y Parreño (1765–1837), who was instrumental in the modernization of the sugar industry in the island (Arango y Parreño 1952), Schmidt-Nowara 1999, 20; Gónzalez-Ripoll and Álvarez Cuartero 2009). Nevertheless, Fernando Ortiz makes a clear distinction between the hacendado Parreño and Saco, the professional bourgeois, and rescues the reputation of the latter (as Torres Cuevas suggests 1984, 10–11). In Saco’s vision, suppression of the slave trade would lead to the gradual end of slavery without any sudden or drastic consequences for the progress of Cuba, including the stability of the agriculture and economy of the island, the empowered saccharocracy, and the white population in general.

Entering the archive The intellectual project of Saco and his fellow literati, Domingo del Monte (1804–1853), José de la Luz y Caballero (1800–1862), and others involved the founding of the short-lived Cuban Literary Academy, which was the basis for the later creation of individual members’ tertulias, 233

Eyda Merediz

conferences, and journal publications that attempted to define the specificity of Cuban culture and defended the right of Cubans to think independently in terms of arts, culture and a wide array of issues. Saco’s specific perspective, a product of his delving into colonial history and slavery, allowed him to access the Hispanic archive and the vast resources of the chronicles of the Indies as the foundational discourse for an Americanism that legitimized the criollo’s double affiliation to both the colonial power and to the native land. In this quandary, the emerging liberal criollo subject could position himself as a national, or even a pan-Hispanic-Caribbean, champion and continue to aspire to provincial political rights across the Atlantic. Saco’s readings of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Fray Juan de Torquemada, Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Bernardino de Sahagún, Fernando de Alba Ixtlilxóchitl, Francisco López de Gómara, Francisco Javier Clavijero, Félix de Azara, Juan Bautista Muñoz, as well as letters, documents, and legal ordinances, together with French and German sources, contributed to his emerging perspective on historiography. Saco’s use of Juan Bautista Muñoz’s writings (1745–1799) is important because the Spanish Official Cosmographer was at the center of the most ambitious project to write the history of the New World in the eighteenth century of which only one volume was ever published, in 1793. However, Muñoz is better known for his founding of the Archivo de Indias almost a decade before; a modern archive, which Daniel Nemser considers not only as part of the Foucauldian discursive system that normalizes erasures but also as a culturally-specific place of eviction and violence born out of “methodological disputes and the geopolitics of imperial competition” (2015, 124). Involved in a serious battle with the Royal Academy of History, Muñoz was convinced that the chronicles of the Indies were unreliable and primary archival sources were needed for rewriting history. For Muñoz and his supporters at the Royal Court, well known and lesser known documents from the early years of contact would help forge a geographic, natural, and political history of the Spanish conquest and colonization of America, as prescribed by the Council of Indies (Nava Rodríguez 1989). Although the Director of the Academy, the Count of Campomanes (1723–1803), and his followers agreed in principle, the rewriting of history for them had to respond to another methodology, that of Scottish historian William Robertson (1721–1793). As Jorge Cañizares Esquerra has argued (2001, 170–203) the nature of the disagreement was epistemological. Muñoz objected to the Protestant’s ideological adjustment of history to the new science of political economy, inaugurated by David Hume and Adam Smith. The translation and annotation of Robertson’s History of America ([1776] 1788) was unacceptable for Muñoz who saw it as a representative of the anti-Catholic Enlightenment at odds with the Spanish empire and its civilization. Saco inherited the historiographic transformations prevalent in the eighteenth century along with the scrutiny of primary sources that motivated his predecessors. Bartolomé de las Casas’ Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552) and the unpublished Historia de las Indias (1527–1560s) became key pieces in his historical quest (see English translations by Andrew Hurley 2003 and Andrée Collar 1971b, respectively). Both texts are featured prominently in Saco’s citations as well as the Décadas (1601–1615) by Royal Chronicler Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, who used, sometimes verbatim, large sections of Las Casas’ historiographical texts, passages that were criticized by Muñoz and others. Las Casas and his Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Las Casas 1821, 2003; Bolívar 1983) served as political ammunition for the independence movements in the continental Americas, for the most part completed by 1824. The influence of this text is evident in the writings of Venezuelan revolutionary Simón Bolívar (1815) and Mexican intellectual Servando Teresa de Mier (1821), for example, but the means by which Las Casas became useful for a Cuban moderate in an island that did not see the end of colonial rule until 1898, is less obvious. 234

The Caribbean conundrum

Recovering Bartolomé de las Casas In the copious pages written by Las Casas, Saco found a combative stance against forms of slavery disguised as legal institutions such as the encomienda, along with an incipient nuanced anthropological gaze that encouraged miscegenation, a masterful use of forensic or judicial rhetoric, the agenda of a reformist often vilified as extremist, and a figure mired in controversy regarding the introduction of African slavery in the Americas (see Giménez Fernández 1953; Hanke 1959; Arias and Merediz 2008). From his exile in Spain and France, Saco not only consulted relevant texts and archives but also waged an active campaign in favor of printing Las Casas’ two monumental histories, The History of the Indies and the Apologética historia sumaria, written by Las Casas between 1527 and the 1560s. Although these are Las Casas’ most impressive historiographic works, they had remained unpublished until then. The Historia was overlooked by the Real Academia de la Historia, which decided to first publish Fernández de Oviedo’s text instead. Saco accuses the Academy of playing politics since it looked favorably into the publication of Las Casas in 1817– 1819 because of the interest that the Brevísima relación had occasioned, but changed its mind completely a decade later, after most of the American republics had become independent. Indeed, Bolívar’s call for the creation of a federal structure, Gran Colombia, encompassing many of the former colonies of Spain, had echoed the rabid condemnations common in the writing of the Dominican, and even proposed to name the new capital city after Bartolomé de las Casas (1983). By 1832, however, the Academy saw little value in Las Casas’ Historia arguing that much of what was valuable of the text had been already copied or cited by Herrera’s Décadas. Saco sought to correct the injustice and called for returning to the original source, not the mediated texts, stating that he could write many pages demonstrating how indispensable Las Casas’ text was in providing a legitimate history of the Hispanic Atlantic. As a flagrant example, Saco brings up Herrera’s misleading statement about Las Casas and the African slave trade (1865, 50–53; see Matos Arévalo 1994) that fueled a long-lived legend. Las Casas’ pronouncements with respect to indigenous rights, the Crown’s economic and social policies, and the Church’s approaches to evangelization were controversial as they often constituted oppositional discourse (1971a, 1992, 1995, 1988–1998). Yet they were never perceived as inconsistent. As far as the Atlantic slave trade was concerned, however, Las Casas has been the subject of many scornful attacks as he was often singled out as a major promoter of the African slave trade to alleviate or substitute for Indian forced labor, given the rapid decimation of the Arawak in the Caribbean. His writing also brought about fervent defense of his discourse and Saco spearheaded this trend. In addition to thoroughly researching the source of the legend, Saco also revealed the missing connection between Las Casas’ early remedies to avoid colonial devastation in the Memoriales (1516, 1518) and his subsequent retraction. Las Casas’ Memoriales (proposals or petitions) proved crucial for the history that Saco wanted to tell but even more important was his Historia de las Indias. The first, Memorial de remedios of 1516, attests to Las Casas’ desire to find a solution to the problem of Indian decimation and suggests, in his eleventh remedy, that Black or other African slaves should be brought to Indian communities to work in the incipient mining industry (27–28). As Saco, Ortiz, and more recently Pérez Fernández demonstrated with exhaustive details of yearly documentation on the slave trade, Las Casas was capitalizing on a practice of transatlantic slavery that had been in place since 1501 and an approach to labor replacement that was already being considered by officials and encomenderos. He was specifically suggesting the importation of African slaves—both Black and white—to America from Castile (ladinos) and not directly from Africa/Guinea (bozales), and his petition was similar to those brought forth at that time by officials, citizens, and members of 235

Eyda Merediz

religious orders (Pérez Fernández 1991, 1995, 21–65). Between his first interventions in 1516– 1520 and his ultimate retraction, Las Casas requested African slaves again in 1531, 1542, and 1543 (Pérez Fernández 1995, 91–93). However, according to Pérez Fernández, Las Casas seemed to have changed his opinion after a trip to Lisbon in 1547—certainly earlier that traditionally thought—and he writes a denunciation in his Historia de las Indias, which was more than thirty years in the making (1995, 112–123). Precisely in the Historia, Las Casas withdraws from his earlier perspective once he realizes that African slaves were unjustly captured and sold. He makes this new evidence available in those chapters dealing with the Portuguese and Castilian expansion into the Canary Islands and Africa (1951, 90–148; bk. 1, chs. 17–27, more specifically in 143–44; bk. 1, ch. 27). Furthermore, he includes evidence in those pages dealing with the Caribbean in the context of the sugar cane plantation and in outlining the presence of what he calls punitive plagues in the New World and implying that slave rebellions were one of them (1951, 176–178; bk. 3, ch. 102; 273–276; bk.3, ch. 129). For Saco it was clear that the publication of the Historia would have permanent consequences for the history of Spanish America and for Cuba since neither he nor Las Casas would accept being labeled as promoters of slavery or what would later be called a negrero in the nineteenth century. As recently as 1991, Pérez Fernández turned to dismantling the legend of Las Casas as a promoter of the slave trade once again and tried to put an end to what was seen as his contradictory stance towards human rights and a clear bias against Blacks (see also Lavou Zoungbo 2001).This idea was invented in Europe by white enlightened intellectuals in the second half of the eighteenth century, mainly by Corneille de Pauw (Recherches philosophiques sur les américains, ou, Mémoires intéressants pour servir à l’histoire de l’espèce humaine, 1768–1769) who opposed Rousseau’s theory of the “bon sauvage.” De Pauw affirmed that Las Casas conceived of the plan of establishing a definitive trade of Black slaves with America (Pérez Fernández 1991, 36–37). The description of Las Casas as a promoter of slavery was perpetuated by Guillaume Thomas François Raynal (Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements des Européens dans les deux Indies, 1770 and 1783 in English), who followed Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, and thus passed it along in the English language to William Robertson, among others (1991, 38–39). Significantly, Robertson commented on this theme: “Las Casas … in the warmth of his zeal to save the Americans from the yoke, pronounced it to be lawful and expedient to impose one still heavier upon the Africans” (Robertson 1788, 1:320–321; see also Adorno 2008, 21–32). It was Saco who traced the problematic source of these statements to 1601, to the pages of the official Royal Chronicler Antonio de Herrera who had access to Las Casas’ unpublished manuscript of the Historia de la Indias, just as Saco did more than two centuries later. Herrera’s report (dec. II, bk.2, ch. 20) contained a damaging statement that later was repeated hyperbolically by Martín Fernández de Navarrete (1825) in his compendium of discoveries of the Spaniards at sea: “In order to mitigate Indian suffering, Casas authorized and established the trade of Black slaves to the islands of the New World as if they were not rational beings.” (“Casas por aliviar a los indios, autorizó y estableció el tráfico de los negros para las islas del Nuevo Mundo como si éstos no fuesen racionales,” quoted in Pérez Fernández 1991, 33 and 40). To Saco’s dismay, the same statement was repeated by his own contemporary, the Spanish intellectual José Amador de los Ríos, prompting Saco’s rebuttal: If such words had been said by a foreigner … an apology would have been sought … but coming from a Castilian who writes during the second half of the nineteenth century, who is featured prominently in the república de las letras, who has been a notable member of the Academy of History in Madrid where the manuscript of Las 236

The Caribbean conundrum

Casas’ Historia is housed. That this Castilian repeats today such outdated accusations, silencing the fact that Las Casas himself recognized his error and regretted it, proves that Mr. Amador de los Ríos did not read it well or simply engaged in hateful partisanship. (Que esas palabras las hubiese estampado un extranjero… alguna disculpa merecería… pero que un castellano que escribe en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX, que figura ventajosamente en la república de las letras, que ha sido miembro notable de la Academia de la Historia de Madrid, en cuya biblioteca se conserva manuscrita la Historia de las Indias del Padre Las Casas, que ese castellano repita hoy tan añejas acusaciones, ­callando… que el mismo Las Casas conoció y se arrepintió de su error, prueba que el señor Amador de los Ríos o no leyó… o incurrió en la odiosa nota de parcial. Saco 1932, 173–174) Saco, however, read Las Casas’ writings with great insight. He read the Memorial already included in Llorente’s 1822 edition, carefully read the unpublished Lascasian manuscript as well, and even read Robertson, most certainly in its French translation. Saco’s keen eye and Caribbean interests revealed nuances that would forever change the manner in which history was transmitted; Saco, in fact, defied the filtering process of northern European letters. Saco was indeed an early apologist of Las Casas precisely because he understood the Dominican’s place in a Caribbean and universal oppositional genealogy to slavery that led to other dissenting voices. Saco was familiar, for instance, with the writing of Bartolomé Frías de Albornoz (1519–1573), a Spanish lawyer who lived in Mexico. His Arte de los contratos, published in Valencia in 1573, questioned the legality of the centuries-old practice of enslaving war captives. Contrary to the usual excuse that enslaving heathens and Christianizing them saved their souls (as Prince Henry of Portugal stated when he received his “royal fifth” from the more than two hundred slaves brought to Portugal in 1444), Frías de Albornoz thought that no African benefited from living as a slave in the New World and that the Church could not justify the violence of the slave trade (Thomas 1997, 146). Nevertheless, regarding the Portuguese enslaving of Ethiopians, Frías de Albornoz was much more hesitant than Las Casas who categorically declared it illegal (Pérez Fernández 1995, 194). Saco also read and quoted texts of the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval (1647) who spent years in Cartagena de Indias in the “ministerio de los morenos.” Although Sandoval was not an abolitionist, he documented the suffering of slaves at the hands of cruel masters and was deeply concerned with their evangelization (see the work of Larissa Brewer García in this volume). Saco was probably less familiar with other writers within the Hispanic tradition who wrote from the same vein of argumentation. He does not cite, for example, the Jesuit priest Miguel García (Brazil 1580) who, similar to Fr. Antonio de Montesinos (1475–1540) condemned the ill treatment of Indians in Hispaniola, and refused to confess slaveholders, as Las Casas had also prescribed in one of his 1552 treatises, Rules for Confessors (1965, 853–913).There is no mention of the historian Juan Suárez de Peralta (Mexico 1540–1613) and his book Noticias históricas de la Nueva España in which he expresses surprise that there were not more voices protesting the treatment of African slaves, noting that there was much outcry in favor of the Indians. For him, a darker skin color was the only difference (“No había otra diferencia más de ser más subidos de color y más prietos” [50]). His book, like Las Casas’ Historia, was only published almost three centuries later in 1878 (see Merediz and Salles-Reese 2008, 177–186, which advanced some of the arguments made here). Unknown to Saco, Las Casas definitely inaugurates an antislavery framework that is radicalized by others like Francisco José de Jaca (1645–1690), a Spanish 237

Eyda Merediz

capuchin friar who lived in Venezuela, Colombia, and Cuba in the seventeenth century. From Havana, Jaca wrote a treatise, Resolución sobre la libertad de los negros y sus originarios, en estado de paganos y después ya cristianos ([1682] 2002), directly advocating emancipation and equality; thus, he contributed to a Caribbean genealogy of legal defiance of Black slavery that has been thought to have flourished much later (Jaca 2002; Moreno Orama 2016; see also Andrés Gallego 2005 for wider overview of comparative arguments in favor and against slavery and Bethencourt’s 2013 critical transhistorical tracing of racisms). In part, due to the intervention of Saco who envisioned Las Casas as the keystone for a Cuban and Caribbean ethos, his two overlooked histories were officially printed, the Historia de las Indias (1875) and much later the Apologética historia sumaria (1909). Las Casas offered a model of Hispanism that was perfectly digestible for the criollo national and transatlantic project, the place where Saco positioned himself. This positioning allowed for multiple identifications with Spain, a complex of simultaneous rejection and acceptance. Las Casas was a transatlantic figure whose dissenting positions and constant legal arguments built the most effective critique against colonial abuse in the Americas. He fought against the encomienda system and its perpetuity, advocated for peaceful evangelization, constantly argued before the Crown on behalf of the indigenous population, and actively sought legal remedies. Like Las Casas before him, Saco sought to reform the colonial structure from a civil and legal framework but without totally severing political ties with Spain. He sees in Las Casas a redemptive model of Hispanism, one that is capable of self-critique and a correction of a course of action, that provides a path to reform not revolt, which very much legitimizes his own standpoint. At the end of his long life, in his Tratado de las doce dudas (1564), Las Casas adopted a more radical stance that openly questioned the legality of the Spanish conquest and went as far as proposing indigenous restoration and restitution in the case of Peru, but Saco was not concerned at all with this final turn as it was even less known and probably not applicable to the Caribbean and its early experience of colonization. The question of miscegenation, that concerned Saco and his contemporaries, was already posed within the strange combination of utopian and pragmatic ideas contained in Las Casas’ first Memorial where, as a young cleric, he presented to the Crown a comprehensive list of remedies for a colonial administration in crisis. In addition to the eleventh remedy discussed above, in the third remedy Las Casas envisions a settlement of married Spanish farmers (labradores) who would take under their tutelage five Indians with their respective families with whom they would share life, work, and profits. Ultimately, Las Casas sets in motion the seed of mestizaje, a plan in which European and indigenous descendants would naturally end up marrying each other (1516, 25).This is the direct result of Las Casas’ nuanced anthropological gaze that did not see Europe’s and Christianity’s others as naturally inferior nor lacking in dominion, that is, the right to lordship and property as many of his later works would show more clearly. Nevertheless, as Carlos Jáuregui and David Solodkow noted, “Las Casas proposes a mestizo modernity in which the material contradictions of coloniality are forged,” consequently, to populate and also to mix (mestizar) became the basis for government and the fundamental axis of Latin American biopolitics (143). Saco, as amply discussed by Ortiz and others, also embraced miscegenation as the inevitable and desirable whitening of the nation. Saco advocated for the diminution and eventual extinction of the Black race in Cuba, hence his stance against the slave trade and his favoring of white immigration, in his own words, with “white faces” and hardworking habits from all over the world (1938a, xxvi–xxviii). For Saco, whitening was of primary importance to attain political respect; thus, he sees as advantageous the union between “white men” and “Black women,” replicating the gendered asymmetric formula of Las Casas between European men and indigenous women. He also rejected the idea that the mulatos were to blame as having major 238

The Caribbean conundrum

responsibility in Haiti’s bloody revolution. Saco’s acceptance of the anthropological gaze found in Las Casas perhaps mitigated the influence of biologically justified theories of the inequality of the human races that began to take root in Europe in the nineteenth century, which led to scientific racist theories and eugenics. Nevertheless, as Jerome Branche has argued “the criollo embrace of mula-tez hides a more serious problem: the suppression of the (darker) slave masses who might emerge as the protagonists of any real project for social change” (2006, 115).

Theorizations in the Spanish Caribbean This intellectual history is important to evaluate the contributions of Las Casas and Saco in theorizations of the Hispanic Caribbean. Fernando Ortiz himself developed a major theoretical approach to cultural exchange and his legacy is multifaceted as the volume edited by Font and Quiroz in 2005 illustrates. As an ethnographer and public intellectual, Ortiz sets Saco apart; he turns to re-edit his publications, writes prologues to the writings, and intently analyzes his works. By the 1940s Ortiz proposed his own theory of transculturation that dismisses race as a deceitful construction (1975, 1978), a departure from his early thought at the turn of the twentieth century, which was receptive to ideas of racial positivism and the criminalization of Afro-Cubans. The extent to which Las Casas functions as a pristine foundational figure in the works of Saco from the start or later becomes an elaborate projection within Fernando Ortiz’s own genealogy for Cuba’s process of transculturation, is a debatable issue but one with the same end result. Ortiz highlights Las Casas and his intellectual project in his prologue to Saco’s volume on Indian slavery (1932, vii–lv), and he inserts his own defense of Las Casas regarding Blacks in his master narrative Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar or Cuban Counterpoint (1978, 300–355; and also in a 1952 article). Purposefully, Ortiz makes Las Casas into a protagonist of Cuban cultural history along with the native tobacco and the Indians who smoked it, as well as the imported sugar and the Black slaves who produced it. He feels compelled to revisit the issue of Las Casas as the promoter of the African slave trade taking readers through the motions of the origins of the false accusations again and Las Casas’ learning process and his ultimate retraction. Following in the steps of Saco, who provided archival evidence for the arrival of the first Africans in the Americas as well as researching the early ordinances that authorized the trade, Ortiz provides additional archival evidence of a continuous trade that had little to do with Las Casas. And finally, Ortiz goes as far as discrediting the Jesuits, who historically had received a lot of praise and credit for their role in the promotion of an anti-slavery ideals, for not having attained the sweeping critique Las Casas had proposed much earlier than they did. Ortiz’s insistence responds, no doubt, to a long-standing misconception that surrounded the figure of Las Casas, which Saco first unveiled with mixed success. His revisionist obsession that places Las Casas along with “la cuestión negra” at the center responds to the fact that he is conscious of being the heir of the nineteenth-century criollos who built their own national project upon a colonial past tied to Las Casas. Ortiz’s contribution is precisely the recognition that what starts as a Cuban and a Hispanic Caribbean project serves as a more general model for a hybrid Latin American paradigm, one which rejects acculturation in favor of transculturation; that is, all cultures in contact have influence and themselves are equally influenced to therefore create something new and transformed. For Ortiz, Las Casas could not be dismissed, because the Dominican was the originator and transmitter of certain knowledge that anticipated modern notions of ethnographic relativity, international laws regarding conflicts among nations, and above all, incipient human rights. Most importantly, Las Casas is again, for Ortiz as he was for Saco, the redeemable facade of Hispanism. Las Casas allows Caribbean intellectuals to resolve the 239

Eyda Merediz

criollo predicament. They can embrace Blackness, mulatez, tranculturation, as well as Hispanism, and a critical colonial legacy of Spain as long as it is embodied by Bartolomé de las Casas. Another important theorization regarding the Hispanic Caribbean was articulated by Antonio Benítez Rojo in his Repeating Island (1989), which de la Campa still finds worthy of analysis two decades after its initial success and alongside Édouard Glissant’s ideas (2012). In his book, Benítez Rojo includes a chapter on Las Casas that he rehearsed in an earlier essay, “Bartolomé de las Casas” (1988). Here he revisits once more Las Casas’ passages in the Historia de las Indias that touch upon Black slavery and offers a critical take on Las Casas’ repentance and guilt. He explores the Dominican’s biblical rhetoric of plagues, pointing out the uncanny parallelism between the plague of ants that attacked Hispaniola and the plague of Blacks that facilitated the birth of the sugar plantation in the Caribbean (1989, 69–147; 1988, 239–258). Benítez Rojo sees Las Casas as a fundamental figure in his theorization of the Caribbean space as a meta-archipelago that repeats itself. Nevertheless, his partial postmodernism and his mostly Cuba-centric corpus of Caribbean literature has been criticized as has the conceptualization of Las Casas as both proto-postmodern and proto-Caribbean (De la Campa 1999, 90–103). Malcolm Read offers further insights in the shortcomings of Benítez Rojo’s psychoanalytical approach to Las Casas by exposing his flaws. For Read, Benítez Rojo’s version of Las Casas’ guilt for having suggested bringing Black slaves to the New World cannot be read in terms of an inversion of the master/slave dichotomy in which the runaway Black slaves become the tormentors of the innocent white settlers (2002, 60–85). José Buscaglia-Salgado’s more recent reflections on Las Casas in Undoing Empire (2003, 92–127), on the other hand, accepts this inversion suggested by Benítez Rojo. For Buscaglia, Las Casas is not only tied to the origins of the plantation and the criollo discourse, but he also sets in motion the politics of mulataje, since Black slavery yields to mulatto culture. Although Read’s critique of Benítez Rojo applies also to Buscaglia’s reading of the episode in the Historia de las Indias, Buscaglia’s revision of Las Casas’ plagues goes further and accuses the Dominican of being on the side of the ‘real’ victims, the European settlers or indianos. Thus, he projects in Las Casas a fear of the “Black” plague that threatens to ruin his utopian vision in which Indians and European farmers can coexist in peace. It is not accidental, however, that Benítez Rojo sets up his version of a Lascasian Caribbean genealogy by quoting José Antonio Saco, nor is it surprising that Buscaglia Salgado builds up his transatlantic genealogy on the work of Saco as well, for any genealogy implies a retrospective gaze that fragments, distorts, and selectively establishes a textual beginning. In this case, the Lascasian corpus serves this purpose. Saco was the first to promote this foundational figure but also helped frame more contemporary articulations that attempt to theorize the Hispanic Caribbean as it grappled with slavery, race, nation formations, and modernity.

The Hispanic archive and the Black Atlantic José Antonio Saco and his active agenda to shape the Hispanic archive placing Bartolomé de las Casas as a cornerstone for a Caribbean, transatlantic, and ultimately global history of slavery can explain in part the complexities of the debates that ultimately led to his contradictory liberal positions. Although Saco was aware of French and British discussions about abolitionism, the Cuban circumstances and the numerous examples of slave rebellions in Haiti, Jamaica and Guadeloupe determined his ultimate position in favor of a gradual and controlled elimination of slavery and consequently Blackness. Ironically enough, Saco’s ideas were not criticized by Cuban independentists like José Martí, but by Republican Spaniards on the other side of the Atlantic, like Rafael María de Labra (Rojas 2013, 44–46). Saco became instead a key 240

The Caribbean conundrum

mediator for more contemporary theorizations advanced by Ortiz and Benítez Rojo who looked into the colonial past and the Lascasian legacy for articulating the basis for a Cuban national imaginary and a Caribbean ethos.That is, Fernando Ortiz’ vision of a process of transculturation and Benítez Rojo’s readings of a paradoxical and complex repeating island and the birth of the plantation, both in dialogue with history. It is in Saco’s work where the relevance of the Hispanic archive in what has been more recently coined the Black Atlantic begins to take shape. The debate opened by Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (1993) was an important one that questioned the notion of history as progress and claimed an alternative modernity tied to the slave ship, which both interrogates location and dismantles periodization. Nevertheless, Gilroy’s proposition has been criticized for its neglect of South Atlantic and African histories (Gikandi 1996, 147) as well as its marginalization of the Iberian Atlantic because of its reliance on the British colonial experience (Gabilondo 2001, 91–113). In his articulation of the Hispanic Atlantic, Joseba Gabilondo proposes a dialogue with Gilroy that allows for the Black Atlantic also to become Hispanic and to establish a metadiscourse that would not renounce “its double and irreducible bind to particularism and universalism” (2001, 100). In this way, the Hispanic Atlantic, which is marked by the early imperial history of Spain as told by Bartolomé de las Casas, also has its particularity in the intersections of nationalism and coloniality predicated by José Antonio Saco and cannot be fully explained by Western, francoor anglo-centric theorizations. Saco thus can shape a notion of Hispanism, filtered through Las Casas, that facilitates multiple and contradictory identifications with Spain, slavery, and racial discourses that allows him to anchor his national, Caribbean, and universal historiographical project in the intersection of the Hispanic and the Black Atlantic. In the end, key pieces within the Hispanic archive have a prominent place in Caribbean intellectual genealogies that include a dialogue with restrictive notions of modernity and universality, revealing in the process, how slavery and the experience of indigenous and Black slaves cannot be erased nor the early historiography that accounted for it, however imperfect, ambivalent, and mediated they may be.

Works cited Adorno, Rolena. 2008.“The Intellectual Life of Bartolomé de Las Casas: Framing the Literature Classroom.” In Approaches to Teaching the Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas, edited by Santa Arias and Eyda M. Merediz, 23–32. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Andrés Gallego, José. 2005. “Los argumentos esclavistas y los argumentos abolicionistas: reconsideración necesaria.” Revista del CESLA 7: 63–108. Arango y Parreño, Francisco de. 1952. Obras. 2 vols. Havana: Dirección de Cultura, Ministerio de Educación. Arias, Santa, and Eyda M. Merediz, eds. 2008. Approaches to Teaching the Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas. Approaches to Teaching World Literatures Series. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Benítez Rojo, Antonio. 1988. “Bartolomé de las Casas: entre el infierno y la ficción.” MLN 103: 239–258. ———. 1989. La isla que se repite. Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte. Bergad, Laird W. 2007. The Comparative Histories of Slavery in Brazil, Cuba, and the United States. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bethencourt, Francisco. 2013. Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bolívar, Simón. [1815] 1983. “Carta de Jamaica.” In Doctrina del libertador, edited by Manuel Pérez Vila, 3rd ed., 55–75. Caracas: Ayacucho. Branche, Jerome C. 2006. Colonialism and Race in Luso-Hispanic Literature. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Buscaglia Salgado, José F. 2003. Undoing Empire. Race and Nation in the Mulatto Caribbean. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Cañizares Esguerra, Jorge. 2001. How to Write the History of the New World. Histories, Epistemologies and Identities. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

241

Eyda Merediz Casas, Bartolomé de las. 1516. “Memorial de remedios para las Indias.” In Obras completas, 23–48. Vol 13. Madrid: Alianza. ———. 1518. “Memorial de remedios para las Indias.” In Obras completas, 49–60.Vol 13. Madrid: Alianza. ———. [1552] 1821. Breve relación de la destrucción de las Indias Occidentales presentada a Felipe II, siendo Príncipe de Asturias, por Fray Bartolomé de las Casas del Orden de Predicadores, Obispo de Chiapa. Edited by Servando Teresa de Mier. Philadelphia: Juan J. Hurtel. (Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes.) http:// www.cervantesvirtual.com/obra-visor/breve-relacion-de-la-destruccion-de-las-indias-occidentales--0/html/. ———. [1552] 1965. Tratados de fray Bartolomé de las Casas. Edited by Juan Pérez de Tudela Bueso. 2 vols. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. ———. [1552] 2003. An Account, Much Abbreviated, of the Destruction of the Indies, with Related Texts.Translated by Andrew Hurley and introduction by Franklin W. Knight. Indianapolis: Hackett. ———. [1875] 1951. Historia de las Indias. Edited by Agustín Millares Carlo. Introduction by Lewis Hanke. 3 vols. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. ———. [1875] 1971b. History of the Indies.Translated and edited by Andrée Collard. New York: Harper & Row. ———. [1909] 1967. Apologética historia sumaria. Edited by Edmundo O’Gorman. 2 vols. Mexico City: UNAM. ———. 1971a. Bartolomé de las Casas: A Selection of His Writings.Translated and edited by George Sanderlin. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ———. 1988–1998. Obras completas. Edited by Paulino Castañeda Delgado. 14 vols. Madrid: Alianza. ———. 1992. Witness: Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas. Translated and edited by George Sanderlin. New York: Orbis Books. ———. 1995. Indian Freedom: The Cause of Bartolomé de las Casas, 1484–1566: A Reader. Translated and edited by Francis Patrick Sullivan. Kansas City: Sheed & Ward. Casas, Bartlomé de las. [1964] 1958. “Tratado de las doce dudas.” Obras escogidas. Vol. 5. Biblioteca de Autores Españoles 110. 478–536. Madrid: Atlas. De la Campa, Román. 1999. Latin Americanism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2012. “El Caribe y su apuesta teórica.” Zama 4: 25–38. Fernández de Castro, José Antonio. 1923. Medio siglo de historia colonial de Cuba. Cartas a José Antonio Saco ordenadas y comentadas (de 1823 a 1879). Havana: Ricardo Veloso. Figarola Caneda, Domingo. 1921. José Antonio Saco. Documentos para su vida. Havana: Imprenta El Siglo XXI. Frías de Albornoz, Bartolomé. 1573. Arte de los contractos.Valencia: Casa de Pedro de Ruete. Font, Maurico A., and Alfonso W. Quiroz, eds. 2005. Cuban Counterpoints. The Legacy of Fernando Ortiz. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Gabilondo, Joseba. 2001. “Introduction. Special Section: The Hispanic Atlantic.” Arizona Journal of Cultural Studies 5: 91–113. García González, Armando. 2008. El estigma del color. Saberes y prejuicios sobre las razas en la ciencia hispanocubana del siglo XIX. 2 vols. Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canarias, SP: Idea. Gikandi, Simon. 1996. “In the Shadow of Hegel: Cultural Theory in the Age of Displacement.” Research in African Literatures 27 (2): 139–150. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic. Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Giménez Fernández, Manuel. 1953. Bartolomé de las Casas. 2 vols. Seville: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos, Universidad de Sevilla. Gónzalez-Ripoll, María Dolores. 2017. “Cultura y tradición en el concepto de raza de José Antonio Saco.” In Esclavitud y diferencia racial en el Caribe hispano, edited by Consuelo Naranjo Orovio, 149–163. Madrid: Doce Calles. Gónzalez-Ripoll, María Dolores, and Izaskun Álvarez Cuartero, eds. 2009. Francisco Arango y Parreño y la invención de la Cuba azucarera. Salamanca: Ediciones de la Universidad de Salamanca. Gónzalez-Ripoll, María Dolores, Consuelo Naranjo Orovio, Ada Ferrer, Gloria García Rodríguez, and Josef Opatrny. 2004. El rumor de Haití en Cuba: temor, raza y rebeldía, 1784–1844. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Guerra, Ramiro. 1970. Azúcar y población en las Antillas. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. Hanke, Lewis. 1959. Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jaca, Francisco José de. [1682] 2002. Resolución sobre la libertad de los negros y sus originarios, en estado de paganos y después ya cristianos. Edited by Miguel Anxo Pena González. Madrid: Consejo de Investigaciones Científicas.

242

The Caribbean conundrum Jáuregui, Carlos A., and David Solodkow. 2018. “Biopolitics and the Farming (of) Life in Bartolomé de las Casas.” Bartolomé de Las Casas: History, Philosophy, & Theology in the Age of European Expansion. Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, Vol 189. Ed. Rady Roldán-Figueroa and David T. Orique Leiden, 127–166. Netherlands: Brill. Knight, Franklin W. 1970. Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Lavou Zoungbo,Victorien, ed. 2001. Las Casas face à l’esclavage des Noirs: vision critique du Onzième Remède (1516)/Las Casas frente a la esclavitud de los Negros: visión crítica del Undécimo Remedio (1516). Perpignan: Université de Perpignan. Le Riverend Brusone, Julio. 1979. “Valoración de Saco. Con motivo del centenario de su muerte.” Revista de la Biblioteca Nacional José Martí 21 (1): 143–158. Llorens, Irma. 1998. Nacionalismo y Literatura. Constitución e institucionalización de la “República de las letras cubanas.” Serie América 2. Lleida, SP: Asociación Española de Estudios Literarios Hispanoamericanos, Universitat de Lleida. Llorente, Juan Antonio. 1822. Colección de las obras del venerable Obispo de Chiapa, don Bartolomé de las Casas. 2 vols. Paris: Casa de Rosa. Matos Arévalo, José A. 1994. “José Antonio Saco. Pensamiento social. Apuntes sobre el padre Bartolomé de Las Casas.” In El pensamiento lascasiano en la conciencia de América y Europa, coordinated by Pablo González Casanova, 57–68. Mexico City: UNAM-Centro de Investigaciones Humanísticas de Mesoamérica y el Estado de Chiapas. Merediz, Eyda M., and Verónica Salles-Reese. 2008. “Addressing the Atlantic Slave Trade: Las Casas and the Legend of the Blacks.” Approaches to Teaching the Writings of Bartolomé de las Casas. Approaches to Teaching World Literatures Series 102: 177–186. Mier, Servando Teresa de. 1821. “Discurso preliminar.” Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, edited by Bartolomé de las Casas, iii–xxxv. Philadelphia: J.H. Hurtel. Moreno Fraginals, Manuel. 1960. José A. Saco, estudio y bibliografía. Santa Clara: Universidad Central de Las Villas. ———. 1978. El ingenio. Complejo económico social cubano del azúcar. 3 vols. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. Moreno Orama, Rebeca. 2016. Escritura, Derecho y Esclavitud. Francisco José de Jaca ante el Nomos Colonial. San Juan, PR: Ediciones Puerto. Naranjo Orovio, Consuelo, ed. 2017. Esclavitud y diferencia racial en el Caribe hispano. Madrid: Doce Calles. Naranjo Orovio, Consuelo, and José F. Buscaglia. 2015. “Race as a Weapon: Defending the Colonial Plantation Order in the Name of Civilization.” Culture & History Digital Journal 4 (2): e012. http:// cultureandhistory.revistas.csic.es/index.php/cultureandhistory/article/view/76/269 Naranjo Orovio, Consuelo, and Puig-Samper Miguel Ángel. 1990. “El legado hispano y la conciencia nacional en Cuba.” Revista de Indias 190: 789–808. Nava Rodríguez, María Teresa. 1989. “Bases y objetivos de una historia general del nuevo mundo: el cargo de cronista mayor de las Indias entre 1755 y 1764.” Cuadernos de Historia Moderna 10: 103–120. Nemser, Daniel. 2015. “Eviction and the Archive: Materials for an Archaeology of the Archivo General de Indias.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 16 (2): 123–141. Opatrny, Josef. 2010. José Antonio Saco y la búsqueda de la identidad cubana. Praga: Karolinum. Ortiz, Fernando. 1929. José Antonio Saco y sus ideas cubanas. Colección Cubana de Libros y Documentos Inéditos o Raros 8. Havana: Imprenta El Universo. ———. 1932. Introducción. In Saco.Vol. 1, vii–lv. Havana: Cultural SA. ———. 1938a. Prólogo. In Saco. Historia de la esclavitud de la raza africana en el Nuevo Mundo y en especial en los países américo-hispanos Vol. 1, vii–lxx. Havana: Cultural SA. ———. 1938b. “Saco. La esclavitud y los negros.” Revista Bimestre Cubana 42 (1–2): 37–64. ———. [1940] 1978. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. Introduction by Julio Le Riverend. Caracas: Ayacucho. ———. 1952. “La leyenda negra contra Bartolomé de las Casas.” Cuadernos Americanos 33: 146–184. ———. 1975. El engaño de las razas. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. Paquette, Robert L. 1988. Sugar Is Made with Blood. The Conspiracy of La Escalera and the Conflict between Empires over Slavery in Cuba. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Pauw, Corneille de. 1768–1769. Recherches philosophiques sur les américains, ou, Mémoires intéressants pour servir à l’histoire de l’espèce humaine. 2 vols. Berlin: Georges Jacques Decker. Pérez, Louis A. 1988. Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

243

Eyda Merediz Pérez Fernández, Isacio. 1991. Bartolomé de las Casas ¿contra los negros? Revisión de una leyenda. Madrid/ Mexico City: Mundo Negro/Esquila. ———. 1995. Fray Bartolomé de las Casas, O.P. De defensor de los indios a defensor de los negros. Salamanca, SP: San Esteban. Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François. 1770. Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements et du commerce des Européens dans les deux Indes. 10 vols. Amsterdam: np. ———. 1783. A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies. London: Printed for W. Strahan and T. Cadell. Read, Malcolm K. 2002. “Benítez Rojo and Las Casas’s Plague of Ants.The Libidinal versus the Ideological Unconscious.” Diacritics 32 (2): 60–85. Robertson, William. [1776] 1788. The History of America. 5th ed., 3 vols. Edinburgh: Printed for A. Strahan, T. Cadell, and J. Balfour. Rojas, Rafael. 2013. “La esclavitud liberal. Liberalismo y abolicionismo en el Caribe Hispano.” Secuencia 86: 29–52. Saco, José Antonio. 1831. Memoria sobre la vagancia en la isla de Cuba. Havana: Imprenta del Gobierno, Capitanía General y Real Hacienda. ———. [1833] 1982. “Análisis por Don José Antonio Saco de una obra intitulada Notices of Brazil in 1828 and 1829 by Rev. R. Walsh. Author of a Journey from Constantinople, etc.” In José Antonio Saco: Acerca de la esclavitud y su historia, edited by Eduardo Torres Cuevas and Arturo Sorhegui, 173–208. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. ———. 1837. Paralelo entre la isla de Cuba y algunas colonias inglesas. Madrid: Tomás Jordán. ———. 1845. La supresión del tráfico de esclavos africanos en la isla de Cuba examinada en relación a su agricultura y su seguridad. Paris: Imprenta de Panckoucke. ———. 1848. Ideas sobre la incorporación de Cuba en los Estados Unidos. Paris: Imprenta de Panckoucke. ———. 1850. Réplica de Don José Antonio Saco a los anexionistas que han impugnado sus ideas sobre la incorporación de Cuba en los Estados Unidos. Madrid: Imprenta de la Compañía de Impresores y Libreros del Reino. ———. 1853. Obras de Don José Antonio Saco. Compiladas por primera vez y publicadas en dos tomos.Vol. 2. New York: Librería Americana y Extranjera de Roe Lockwood e hijo. ———. 1858. Papeles científicos, históricos, políticos y de otros ramos sobre la isla de Cuba. 3 vols. Paris: Imprenta de D’Aubusson y Kugelmann. ———. 1865. “La Historia de las Indias por fray Bartolomé de las Casas y la Real Academia de la Historia.” Revista Hispanoamericana 12: 50–53. ———. 1869. L’esclavage à Cuba et la révolution d’Espagne. Translated and Introduction by Léon-PierreAdrien de Montluc. Paris: E. Dentu. ———. 1875–1877. Historia de la esclavitud desde los tiempos más remotos hasta nuestros días. 3 vols., vol. 1, Paris: Tipografía Lahure; vol. 2, Paris: Imprenta de Kugelmann; vol. 3, Barcelona: Imprenta de Jaime Jepús. ———. 1879. Historia de la esclavitud de la raza africana en el Nuevo Mundo y en especial en los países américohispanos.Vol 1. Barcelona: Imprenta de Jaime Lepus. ———. 1881. Colección póstuma de Papeles científicos, históricos, políticos y de otros ramos sobre la isla de Cuba ya publicados, ya inéditos. Havana: Miguel de Villa. ———. 1883. Historia de la esclavitud de los indios en el Nuevo Mundo. Edited by Vidal Morales y Morales. Havana: Establecimiento Tipográfico de la Viuda de Soler. ———. 1893. Historia de la esclavitud de la raza africana en el Nuevo Mundo y en especial en los países américohispanos. Edited by Vidal Morales y Morales. Havana: Imprenta de Álvarez y Cía. ———. 1932. Historia de la esclavitud de los indios en el Nuevo Mundo. Introduction by Fernando Ortiz. Contributor Vidal Morales Morales. 2 vols. Havana: Cultural SA. ———. 1938. Historia de la esclavitud de la raza africana en el Nuevo Mundo y en especial en los países américohispanos. Prologue by Fernando Ortiz. 4 vols. Havana: Cultural SA. ———. 2001. Obras. Edited by Eduardo Torres-Cuevas. Biblioteca de Clásicos Cubanos, 5 vols. Havana: Imagen Contempóranea. ———. 2002. Obras completas. 5 vols. Orígenes del pensamiento Cubano. Biblioteca digital de clásicos cubanos. Madrid: Fundación MAPFRE. ———. 2012. Historia de la esclavitud en las colonias francesas. Introduction, compilation and notes by Orestes Gárciga. Havana: Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, Editorial Ciencias Sociales. Sandoval, Alonso de. 1647. De instauranda aethiopum salute. Madrid: Alonso de Paredes.

244

The Caribbean conundrum Sartorius, David. 2013. Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Schmidt-Nowara, Christopher. 1999. Empire and Anti-Slavery. Spain, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, 1833–1874. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. ———. 2011. Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Scott, Rebecca Jarvis. 2000. Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1865–1899. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Torres-Cuevas, Eduardo. 1984. La polémica de la esclavitud. José Antonio Saco. Havana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales. ———. 2001. “Introduction.” In José Antonio Saco, 1–99. Vol. 1. Biblioteca de Clásicos Cubanos. Havana: Imagen Contempóranea. Thomas, Hugh. 1997. The Slave Trade: The History of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1440–1870. New York: Touchstone. Varela, Félix. [1822] 1938. “Memoria que demuestra la necesidad de extinguir la esclavitud de los negros en la isla de Cuba, atendiendo a los intereses de sus propietarios.” In Historia de la esclavitud de la raza africana en el Nuevo Mundo y en especial en los países américo-hispanos, by José Antonio Saco, edited by Fernando Ortiz, 5–17.Vol 4. Havana: Editorial Cultural. Zeuske, Michael. 2016. “The French Revolution in Spanish America.” In The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History, edited by Allan Forrest and Matthias Middell. 77–95. London: Routledge.

245

PART III

Materialities and archives

14 MATERIAL ENCOUNTERS Columbus’s Diario del primer viaje and the objects of colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies Raquel Albarrán

This chapter examines how material objects shape representations of the Caribbean, and by extension of the New World, in Christopher Columbus’s Diario del primer viaje (1492–1493). Columbus’s first impressions come to us from the account of his ship log documenting aspects of his travels in search of a new trade route to Asia.This document, which Columbus originally presented along with other reports of his travels to the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, has been lost to contemporary scholars. However, before its disappearance it was partially transcribed, edited, and commented on by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas in the sixteenth century. Although the presumed text of Columbus’s ship log bears significant evidence of Las Casas’s authorial intervention, it offers a vital picture of Columbus’s original words, albeit an incomplete one (Zamora 1993). In what scholars recognize now as the reconstituted text of the Diario, the materiality of the objects desired, found, or exchanged provides a consistent thread between the pre- and post-“discovery” phases of Columbus’s narrative, thus suturing the crisis of intelligibility that the encounter with the New World produces. Focusing on this process of materialization, I show how incorporating the study of material culture and materiality into studies of the encounter—and, more broadly, into studies of the colonial period—can help enrich our understanding of the colonial world. Furthermore, new insights arise regarding the place of objects in familiar narratives of colonial possession, exchange, and domination as we analyze them from a materially-based perspective.The emergence and adoption of this multi-layered paradigm has greater implications for the interdisciplinary nature of the field, providing a common thread across the varying disciplinary approaches and methodologies represented in it.

Material culture, materiality, and colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies: an overview Material approaches in the study of the Caribbean, as was the case in many other parts of the world, had their origins in the work of amateur scholars known as antiquarians. To these individuals we owe many of the earliest interpretations of Taíno and Arawak cultures in the region. 249

Raquel Albarrán

Most antiquarians were intellectuals or members of the European and Creole (criollo) elites working in a number of distinguished professions such as medicine, law, writing, journalism, and politics (Curet 2011).Throughout the nineteenth century, European and local antiquarians were involved in the early efforts of, on the one hand, identifying and excavating Indigenous sites and, on the other, buying, collecting, and exhibiting Indigenous artifacts. Antiquarian pursuits led to the consideration of the fragments of history as material evidence. Later archaeological explorations exhumed ruins and artifacts that incited questions about the appropriate methods and sources for writing such history, often producing an autonomous framework of interpretation with which to cross-examine official narratives. As L. Antonio Curet (2011) observes, however, the majority of the individuals and organizations tasked with investigating material records in the Caribbean were not scientific or academic in nature. Since the second half of the twentieth century and despite these obstacles, the now-classical archaeological studies of, among others, Eugenio Fernández Méndez (1972), Luis Chanlatte Baik (1976), José Juan Arrom (1989), Kathleen Deagan and José María Cruxent (2002), and Reniel Rodríguez Ramos (2010) have contributed to a richer understanding of pre-Hispanic and colonial material histories. Their work has served as a cornerstone for newer generations of archaeologists working across the Caribbean. The aforementioned conditions fostered a certain degree of interdisciplinarity in the study of the region’s material history, a characteristic equally shared by the emergent wave of material studies taking place in the academy. Across multiple fields of knowledge (including the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences), the “material turn” has brought into sharp focus the critical potential of objects and other types of material phenomena. This term encompasses a broad range of conversations that traverse different fields of inquiry and disciplinary orientations. Below, I will touch upon two major currents that are part of the material turn: (1) “material culture studies,” including a host of other paradigms displaying affinity for the study of material objects; and (2) “new materialisms,” with a brief discussion of other types of speculative realism, as this philosophical orientation is also known. The field of “material culture studies” focuses on the physical study of objects (artifacts) in order to unearth new narratives grounded in material histories. Although the precise origins of the term “material culture” are unclear, we can locate its antecedents in the nineteenth century (Buchli 2002). It was then when the American historian William H. Prescott coined in his travelogue the term “material civilization” (1843, 330). He used it to describe the physical and technical aspects of Aztec culture at the start of the Spanish conquest in 1519, in a series of vignettes about the market of Tenochtitlan. Prescott’s use of the concept was in line with dominant theories of cultural achievement, which positioned the world’s “races” in hierarchical relation to and always below the social formations of the Old World. Clearly, nineteenth-century historians were not the first nor the only ones to place value on material culture; in fact, material objects have been important to Western culture, from antiquity to early modernity and beyond. Some of the countless examples include the proliferation of vessels in Roman representational iconography; the vital role attributed to Christian relics in medieval spirituality; or the resurgence of still life painting (bodegones) during the Spanish Baroque (Swift 2007; Bynum 2011; Zuese 2015). However, after Prescott, a specific notion of material culture evolved in scholarly literature from the colonialist legacies of European expansion (of which collections were an integral part) and the birth of modern consumer culture. Initially housed within the twin disciplines of anthropology and archaeology, material

250

Material encounters

culture studies gradually expanded to the consideration of a wider set of physical phenomena examined through a diversity of ideological and disciplinary perspectives.1 Today, the study of material culture includes any tangible manifestation of the physical world, from art, technology, architecture, and the built environment to nature, landscape, and physical bodies, human or otherwise. It may sometimes include as well investigations into language, sound, performance, and media. Explicitly or implicitly, material culture studies center the organization of human sociality in relation to the material world—with varying degrees of proximity to historical materialism in the legacy of Karl Marx. Therefore, the way humans and societies use, produce, consume, and exchange objects and material culture is as important as the practices and behaviors surrounding them.  Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1986) coined the term “the social life of things” to refer to the porous and sometimes ambiguous boundary between persons and things in social relations. In art history, literature, and cultural studies, the study of objects and material culture has generated a substantial critical production. This research includes, for example, the study of Blackness and material culture in Renaissance England; material histories in American culture (what Bill Brown has called “a sense of things”); the circulation of objects in imperial Spain; and “thing theory” as a theoretical approach that interrogates the subject-object divide (Hall 1995; Brown 2003; Barnard and De Armas 2013; Price 2014). Another quite distinct but interrelated orientation focuses on the philosophical and/or scientific study of material objects. While there is no unified theory of materiality, scholars working within or in relation to the emergent paradigm of “new materialisms” agree that matter is “a key component of events, lives, and worlds” (Shomura 2017, ¶ 2). For them, materiality can be defined as the physical processes that inform the study of matter, but more importantly so, as the ways in which these processes generate structures of signification through different levels of meaning and agency. Jane Bennett’s (2010) “vibrant materialism” is an ethical-speculative methodology that reanimates the vastness, the incommensurability, and the mundanity of matter. Leaving no stone unturned in the landscape of Western knowledge production, new materialisms maintain a transversal relationship with preceding systems of thought, from Lucretius’s atoms and Cartesian-Newtonian conceptions of matter to Martin Heidegger’s notion of the object, Simone de Beauvoir’s embodied materialism, the materiality of the sign in Jacques Lacan, and the materialist ontology (the study of being) of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (Coole and Frost 2010). At the same time, a solid anchoring in feminist and queer methodologies has been from the beginning a defining feature of new materialisms, as evidenced in the pioneering contributions to the field by Judith Butler (1993), Karen Barad (2007), and Rosi Braidotti (2013). No less axiomatic tenets of the new materialisms are their departure from dualism (or binary thinking), anthropocentrism, and linguistically based analyses. Mexican philosopher Manuel De Landa contends, for instance, that “[a]ny materialist philosophy must take as its point of departure the existence of a material world that is independent of our minds” (in Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012, 38). Consequently, new materialists embrace a post-Kantian metaphysics (the study of reality) that distributes agency across human and more-than-human agents alike. It is thus often said that the new materialisms have brought about a new wave of posthumanist thought. Generally speaking, this means that new materialists either complicate or flat out reject subjectivity, proposing instead new ways of thinking causality across matter, language, and meaning— what Donna Haraway (2004) has called our “material-semiotic reality” or what Karen Barad (2007) has termed “intra-actions.”

251

Raquel Albarrán

The philosophical movement known as “object-oriented ontology” is another branch of speculative realism. It emerged during the first decade of the twenty-first century to vindicate the phenomenological study of objects themselves, outside and beyond the purview of human interaction (Harman 2002; Bryant 2011; Bogost 2012). Most notably, the French philosopher Quentin Meillasoux has developed a critique of “correlationism” (the relationship between being and thought) to inquire about what can exist in the absence of rationality (in Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). Despite the allure of a subjectless ontology, some argue that we may not need or want to entirely let go of subjectivity—particularly in its post-Foucaultian manifestation, which theorizes how mechanisms of subjection shape and mold the contours of embodied, institutionalized power. Accordingly, the now displaced subject of speculative realism is met with stern criticism by scholars of race. In the words of Denise Ferreira da Silva,“wishing the subject out of existence by holding onto an independent object without attending to how one informs the other is not enough for announcing a whole new philosophical age” (2017, ¶ 1). The decolonial élan of Ferreira da Silva’s words stresses the continued critical valence of subject-oriented paradigms, precisely because the restitution of the (racialized) subject is at the heart of radical critiques of objectification. Such critiques were first articulated in modern race theory and the fields of colonial and post-colonial studies by Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. Writing at the height of the négritude movement in France and the French Caribbean, Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism (1950) coined the term “thingification” (chosification in the original French) to name the particular violence of commodification that the colonized endure. In other words, “thingification” refers to the process by which the colonizer negates the personhood of the oppressed to further dominate and submit them, both materially and symbolically. For Césaire, then, colonization equals dehumanization ([1950] 2001, 42). Similarly, in Black Skin White Masks ([1952] 1967), Fanon suggests that the colonized find negative representation in the ontology of the colonial object. For Fanon, such an object is a figure for the wide-scale destruction and fragmentation of the world brought about by European colonization, and the place of the abjected Black subject within this regime of power. Current scholarship in new materialisms has yet to seriously engage with the history of dehumanization embedded in colonial articulations of materiality and objecthood, which tacitly or explicitly take the (racialized) colonial subject as the debased, less-thanhuman grounds of the species—what Sylvia Wynter has termed “the coloniality of being/power/ truth/freedom” (2003, 327–328). It is however promising that in recent years some of the most daring examples of new materialist thought take a definitive stance against imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, and the ecological destruction of our planet—all phenomena that locate causality in human agency. Critiques of this nature can be found in the works of Arun Saldanha (2007), Mel Chen (2012), Monique Allewaert (2013), Kim TallBear (2015), and Anna Tsing (2015). Research on the material histories of the conquest and colonization of Latin America and the Caribbean is still in its early stages, and relatively dominated by methodological approaches stemming from the disciplines of art history, anthropology, and archaeology. T   hese disciplines all engage with material culture, albeit in their own distinctive ways. From the vantage point of the history of art, Daniela Bleichmar and Peter Mancall (2011) and Alessandra Russo (2014) identify networks of collaboration that position New World aesthetic productions at the center of European art. Barbara Mundy and Dana Leibsohn (2012) study Indigenous objects beyond the themes of absence and resistance, introducing “circulation” and “materiality” as analytical rubrics that account for the complexity of the study of Native material culture, especially in relation to early modern imperial histories. Carolyn Dean (2014), on the other end, moves away from representational logics to demonstrate that Indigenous communities in the Andes adhered to a richer notion of presence than the one afforded by the Eurocentric gaze. More recently, social 252

Material encounters

and cultural historians have incorporated material analysis into their study of the encounter, the conquest, and the viceregal period. One example of this type of historical analysis is Tamara Walker’s Exquisite Slaves (2017). Walker analyzes the sartorial practices of slaves in eighteenthand nineteenth-century Lima, Peru to argue that slaves negotiated their gender, race, and status through their choice of clothing and accessories. Judging by their contributions to the field in recent years, material perspectives have also gained traction among literary and cultural critics, who have begun to engage with the study of objects and materiality more generally to expand the analysis of colonial textual sources. This research began appearing in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, though its antecedents can be traced back to the work of Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz. Ortiz’s Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940) approaches consumable goods like tobacco and sugar as objects with cultural agency.  This critical study has become a foundational example of how to theorize material contact and exchange from the colony to the present. In Things with a History (2019), Héctor Hoyos builds upon Ortiz to sketch a Latin American aesthetic tradition that he terms “transcultural materialism.” While oriented toward contemporary literary production, Hoyos offers a paradigm that effectively integrates traditional Marxist approaches with new materialism, thus expanding the spatial and methodological range of new materialist studies as well as paving the way for regional scholars working on other periods and archives. The technological developments of Native communities are key to redefining many of the terms of debate. In this vein, one can locate Gustavo Verdesio’s (2001) dynamic account of the colonial Indigenous cerritos, or ritual mounds, located in present-day Uruguay; and Galen Brokaw’s (2010) historico-linguistic assessment of Andean mnemonic knots (khipus). The vast scientific and philosophical production of colonial subjects in the Americas, Indigenous and otherwise, has received attention at the hands of Ivonne Del Valle (2009), Orlando Bentancor (2017), and Allison Bigelow (2020). From a different angle, Daniel Nemser (2017) traces the relationship between materiality, race, and spatial technologies of population control. The economic dimension of the colonial project has been carefully examined by Elvira Vilches (2010), who studies the commercial, material, and symbolic life of gold in early modern Spain. Straddling colonial and contemporary processes in the larger Atlantic world, Rachel Price (2014) discusses the epistemic forces that have led scholars to re-invest in the language of materiality. Price does not ignore either the dehumanization imposed by slavery nor the objectification of Blackness, conditions to which post-emancipation artists and intellectuals in Cuba and Brazil were especially attuned, in myriad and complex ways. Material analyses produced by the major disciplinary frameworks, as succinctly represented above, have similarly shown us that the study of the material world—whether directly, through artifacts and other material representations, or indirectly, through information about them collected in textual and visual sources—invariably complicates our understanding of colonial dynamics. This research is by nature comparative, transatlantic, and global, as material exchanges between the Old World and the New produced multiple, often surprising itineraries that challenge monolithic conceptualizations of the dynamics between metropole and colony. Furthermore, the study of material processes can help bridge the gap between the different disciplines that constitute the fulcrum of colonial studies about the New World. Below, I discuss two productive directions for this research. First, as Césaire, Fanon, and others have observed, a critical reassessment of colonial object cultures, in all their kaleidoscopic dimensions, illuminates the imperial/colonial processes that subsidize the iniquitous objectification of Indigenous, Black, and otherwise racialized colonial subjects in the Americas. I will return to and elaborate upon this idea toward the end of the chapter, in a discussion of colonial object ontologies, which is the term I propose for the resistance 253

Raquel Albarrán

of the oppressed to the dehumanizing force of colonial objectification. Second, critically engaging with colonial objects and materiality reconnects the increasingly interdisciplinary practices of scholars in the field of colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies with the vexed histories of production, circulation, and reception of colonial textual and visual sources. We need not be new materialists in order to recognize that objects and other types of material culture do possess their own type of agency. This generally means that under different circumstances material referents appear in our interpretive horizon and perform cultural work independently from the texts and images that populate Western ideas of language and signification. However, it bears remembering that a great number of colonial textual and visual sources, if not the majority, were accompanied by or produced under the influence of different types of physical media. In many cases these acted as supplement, and/or as substitute, to the traditional tools and material supports of lettered culture. This is the case, for instance, if we consider the immediate conditions of production, circulation, and reception of Columbus’s ship logs, of Hernán Cortés’s accounts, and of the sixteenth century Relaciones geográficas—an exhaustive questionnaire designed by the royal cosmographer Juan López de Velasco in 1577 to obtain information about the nature of the Spanish American lands and its peoples. Along with the letters and official reports he presented to the Spanish monarchs in 1493, Columbus brought with him to Europe about ten Taíno Indians. Wearing golden masks with precious stones and carrying tropical birds and other seemingly exotic items, the Taíno and their material culture were paraded from Seville to Barcelona, between March and April of that year (Deagan and Cruxent 2002, 15; Vilches 2004, 209). In what must have been considered an exuberant display of New World marvels, the Taíno and the Spaniards’ strategic representation of their material world became the first and perhaps only contact with the newly “discovered” lands European audiences would experience until further explorations took place. Many more tokens extracted from the Indies would soon follow. Twenty-five years after the first “discoveries,” Cortés’s approach to gathering Aztec material culture was more systematic. In the inventory of July 10, 1519 that the conquistador compiled a few months after taking settlement in Veracruz (appended to the “Carta de Cabildo”), Cortés refers to the spectacular, marvelous, but also monstrous nature of about 180 Indigenous objects that were to be sent to the royal family. T   he content of this shipment included substantial quantities of gold, silver, jewels, shields, feathers, and garments that were to be received in addition to the Royal Fifth (quinto real) that by law reserved for the Crown one fifth of all the confiscated, found, or extracted metals and commodities coming from overseas. The practice of procuring and shipping Indigenous objects all across Europe, and to places as distant as the Moluccas and Algiers, is one that Cortés would continue until his last days (Russo 2011). In the case of the much later Relaciones geográficas, the artifacts chosen to accompany the questionnaires were maps including detailed sketches of the surveyed colonial cities and their environs. Though the survey was exclusively addressed to colonial officials, their lack of familiarity with the Spanish American lands resulted in most (if not all) of the maps painted in response to the questionnaire being produced by Indigenous artists, particularly painters or tlacuilos from the Viceroyalty of New Spain.2 As Margot Beyersdorff indicates, these maps accompanied the officials’ reports and together were “sent to the Council of the Indies from where they were later disseminated to private or state manuscript collections and repositories in Europe and the Americas” (2007, 133). For each of the cases above, the objects, material culture, and even biological specimens that were gathered, collected, and sent abroad were not only evidentiary of the material realities of the New World, they also activated the sensory and otherwise aesthetic experience that subtended every imperial act of domination. The rich conditions of textual-material interaction evidenced in Columbus, Cortés, and the Relaciones extend as well to the rest of colonial Latin America and the Caribbean. Consider, as 254

Material encounters

example, Andean colonial writings that were created in close dialogue with Indigenous presentational media such as khipus and sacred stones (huacas), such as Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s Comentarios reales (1609) (Cornejo-Polar 1994; Mazzotti 1996). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, other types of accounts in New Spain relied heavily on the archaeological remnants of a pre-Hispanic past, such as the proto-scientific treatises produced by Creole antiquarians (Cañizares-Esguerra 2001; More 2013). From Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngoras’s early archaeological studies to Antonio de León y Gama’s scholarly efforts to decipher Indigenous material records, materiality gained primacy alongside writing as a contested domain and an influential avenue of legitimation for Creole discourses of the time (Albarrán 2016). Numerous other examples have pushed scholars to move beyond the analytical limits imposed by canonical written sources, which only adds to the quality and methodological diversity of the research (Rappaport 1994; Verdesio 2001; Cummins 2002; Salomon 2004; Del Valle 2009; Dean 2014; Bigelow 2020). In each case, it is important to keep in mind that even as they exploited textualmaterial interactions, colonial regimes of intelligibility also sought to suppress them, thus cleaving and abstracting materiality from the representational operations that were essential to the survival and reproduction of imperial discourses and practices. It might prove fruitful to determine when, precisely, and under what set of circumstances material objects and materiality were left out of colonial written sources—and our analyses of them. In the meantime, the idea that the critical study of objects, material culture, and materiality can bring us closer to understanding the original conditions of production, circulation, and reception of colonial texts, as well as the cultural work they perform for audiences and institutions in the present, is most productive, and deserves our full consideration. In his widely influential book What do Pictures Want? (2005), W. J. T. Mitchell interrogates the conditions that bind material culture to the study of imperial practices. He asks: “What would it mean to think of empire in terms of a broad range of objects and object types?” (146). To Mitchell’s provocative question about the primacy of objecthood to empire, we can add a host of new ones. What cultures of the object were prevalent in medieval Europe at the turn of the fifteenth century? What sort of objects were paradigmatic of the colonial exchange? On the one hand, what notions of materiality were at work when Christopher Columbus arrived in the Indies; on the other, what were those unique to the development of Indigenous and African cultures? How do we factor in these often-competing notions of objecthood and materiality into our analyses of this momentous historical juncture? How does attending to material culture and materiality shift our idea of the representational structures that operate in colonial Latin American and Caribbean texts? What sorts of implications might this have for the study of colonialism in the region, and colonialism at large? While not all these questions are answerable within the scope of this chapter, I offer them here as an invitation for further dialogue. Below, I continue my inquiry at the intersection of material culture studies, new materialisms, and colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies. I proceed to analyze how one of the foundational texts of the Spanish colonial imaginary in the Americas, Columbus’s Diario del primer viaje (1492–1493), mobilizes the representational language of material objects to make sense of a new reality outside of Europe, and to craft a discourse of power and possession that runs across the pre- and post-“discovery” phases of the narrative.

The materiality of Columbus’s first Atlantic crossing The uninitiated reader of Columbus’s ship log is often tempted to skim through the first seventeen pages or so of the account. During this period the Genoese captain and his crew spend close to five weeks mired in confusion as they sail across the Atlantic. Except perhaps for the two 255

Raquel Albarrán

conflicting reckonings Columbus keeps of the distance traveled (from which he subtracts a good number of leagues in the daily reports to his crew), there is something utterly formulaic—even monotonous—in the string of non-events that precede the “discovery” of the New World on October 11, 1492. From September to October the sailors traveled westward day and night, seeing little beyond open water, sky, and heavenly bodies. When they did, however, the repertoire of their sightings was rather limited. It included various species of birds traveling alone or in flocks; marine wildlife such as fishes, crustaceans, and dolphins; countless patches of free-floating seaweed approaching the Spanish vessels; and the occasional object, usually garbage or refuse, spotted off in the distance. No matter how random or insignificant, the Admiral interprets all of these things as unequivocal signs of land. During this period the narrative transitions, as the Columbian experience transforms, from a natural order of classification and intelligibility to an increased sense of uncertainty that “mirrors the actual error of the sailing course” in search of referents for the trade centers of eastern Asia (Vilches 2004, 208). The first recognizable signifier—the ship—is obvious and expected, even if things get off to a rocky start on September 6 when they depart from the last port of call in La Gomera. Upon crossing paths with a friendly caravel, the Admiral learns that the king of Portugal, Dom João II, had sent a group of envoys to capture him in punishment for his association with the Castilian monarchs (Columbus 2005, 45). This contextual reality, affirmed by the technologies, artifacts, and provisions available to the expedition, becomes increasingly precarious as the narrative progresses. Five days later Columbus’s projected image of the ship as a sign of power and economic advantage begins a slow process of erosion that over the coming weeks of the voyage would conclude in shipwreck. The opening event in the narrative demise of this signifier (the ship) takes place on September 11 when the crew identifies a fragment of the mast of a medium-sized vessel: “That day they sailed on their course, which was west, and they made 20 leagues and more; and they saw a big piece of mast from a ship of 120 toneles and they could not salvage it” (“Aquel día navegaron a su vía, que era el Güeste, y anduvieron 20 leguas y más, y vieron un gran troço de mástel de nao de ciento y veinte toneles, y no lo pudieron tomar” Columbus 2005, 46).3 This brief entry does not contain further details that would help situate the mast within its proper navigational framework. Thus, it is doubly dislodged, as a fragment of a fragment, from its structural place in the main body of the phantom vessel, and by extension, from the Western narrative of economic gain and cultural expansion of which the ship is symbol. Here the object at sea lends credence to Jane Bennett’s vitalism, which calls to “detach materiality from the figures of passive, mechanistic, or divinely infused substance” (2010, xiii). The mast fragment, coupled with the crew’s failure to apprehend it, marks a liminal stage in the transition from the Old World to an unknown order—or rather a state of disarray and uncertainty that references an even bigger possibility of failure looming in the horizon. Made of wood reminiscent of Jesus’s cross, the mast initiates the chain of materialities of the Diario. In a fateful coincidence that defies the generic conventions of the travel log, the mast fragment prefigures the eventual shipwreck on December 25 that would lead to the establishment of Villa de Navidad, a fort constructed in Hispaniola from the salvaged lumber of the Santa María (Columbus 2005, 145–147). The mast fragment also alerts us to the fact that the category of European material culture experiences a crisis of deterritorialization in the space of the sea. This crisis signals a state of vulnerability for European civilization that would be equated with nudity and chaos in the later textual corpus of the conquest, as José Rabasa aptly points out in his commentary to the two editions of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios (first published in 1542) (2000, 79–82). Similarly to the use of clothing in Cabeza de Vaca’s later account, objects and material culture serve as the tacit language by which Columbus will express his fears and sense of uncertainty 256

Material encounters

about the voyage.This sense of uncertainty is first encoded in the image of the ship, and particularly in the material agency of the mast fragment adrift, which marks the mariners’ initial separation from the European landmass toward an exploration of the unknown. In medieval times, the sea was thought to connect the tripartite structure of the earth (Europe, Asia, Africa). More than the sea, it was perhaps the dark and dangerous forest that was the paramount symbol of the unknown, represented in the opening stanzas of Dante Alighieri’s inferno in the Divina Commedia (1308–1321). Columbus himself was familiar with a vast repertoire of texts that ranged from Ptolemy’s Geographia (c. 150 AD) to Marco Polo’s Travels (c. 1300); this made him an active participant of the reading and writing culture of his time. Perceptibly, six days after seeing the mast, on September 17, Columbus and his crew encounter something like a forest in the open sea: They saw much weed and very often and it was vegetation from rocks and it came from a westerly direction; they judged themselves to be near land. The pilots took the north, marking it, and found that the compasses northwested a full point [i.e., eleven and one-quarter degrees]; and the sailors were fearful and depressed and did not say why. The Admiral was aware of this and he ordered that the north again be marked when the dawn came, and they found that the compasses were correct. The cause was that the North Star appears to move and not the compasses. When dawn came that Monday they saw much more vegetation and what seemed to be river weed, in which they found a live crab that the Admiral kept; and he says that those were sure signs of land because they are not found [even] 80 leagues from land. They found the seawater less salty since leaving Canaries and the breezes always softer. Everyone went along very happily and each ship sailed as fast as it could so as to see land first.They saw many dolphins and the men of the Niña killed one. The Admiral says here that those signs were from the west where I hope in that mighty God in Whose hands are all victories that very soon He will give us land. On that morning he says that he saw a white bird which is called a tropic bird and which does not usually sleep at sea. (Vieron mucha[s] yerva y muy a menudo y era yerva de peñas y venían las yerva de hazia Poniente. Juzgavan estar çerca de tierra. Tomaron los pilotos del Norte, marcándolo, y hallaron que las agujas noruesteavan una gran cuarta, y temían los marineros y estavan penados y no dezían de qué. Cognosciólo el Almirante, mandó que tornasen a marcar el Norte en amaneçiendo, y hallaron qu’estavan buenas las agujas. La causa fue porque la estrella que parece haze movimiento y no las agujas. En amaneçiendo aquel lunes vieron muchas más yervas y que pareçían yervas de ríos, en las cuales hallaron un cangrejo bibo, el cual guardó el Almirante.Y dize que aquellas fueron señales ciertas de tierra, porque no se hallan ochenta leguas de tierra. El agua de la mar hallavan menos salada desde que salieron de las Canarias, los aires siempre más suaves. Ivan muy alegres todos, y los navíos, quien más podía andar andava por ver primero tierra.Vieron muchas toninas y los de la Niña mataron una. Dize aquí el Almirante que aquellas señales eran el Poniente “donde espero en aquel Alto Dios, en cuyas manos están todas las victorias, que muy presto nos dará tierra”. En aquela mañana dize que vido una ave blanca que se llama rabo de junco que no suele dormir en la mar.) (Columbus 2005, 48) A pair of clearly defined narrative sequences structures this journal entry, together forming a compendium of adversities embedded within a providentialist framework.4 The first narrative sequence is bracketed by the sighting, on two separate occasions, of different kinds of weed, an 257

Raquel Albarrán

indexical manifestation of the natural world that appears at a moment of epistemological crisis, and which is interpreted by all parts of the crew as proof of a measurable distance from land. Oblivious to variations of the earth’s magnetic forces across navigational lines and meridians—a phenomenon observed by Chinese cosmographers as early as 720 AD—the pilot’s compasses angle toward the North Star, but their needles decline to the northwest instead. However, a few hours later the needles return to their correct position. It is then when the Admiral presumes, incorrectly, that the swarms of nest-like bundles floating toward their ships are made of endemic species of weed that grow, respectively, in stones and rivers of the East Indies (“it was vegetation from rocks” [“y era yerva de peñas”] and “they saw much more vegetation and what seemed to be river weed” [“vieron muchas más yervas y que pareçían yervas de ríos”]). In truth, Columbus is likely to have encountered the vast deposits of seaweed and refuse carried into the Sargasso Sea, a massive oceanic region in the north Atlantic named and charted by Portuguese seafarers in the fifteenth century. The speculative geography of this passage is, however, not a choice at random. Capitalizing on both the productive semiotics of forest and treasure, its assemblage recalls Donna Haraway’s notion of “naturecultures.” The lattice filigree of yellow ochre and green algae enclosing the Spanish ships washes away uncertainty by conjuring instead remote images of possibility, of unclaimed swaths of precious stones and riches such as emeralds and gold (both of which are harvested and extracted from mature stones and bodies of water). Adumbrating such promise is the language of amorphous materiality, at once nature and accident, coordinate and symbol. During the second narrative sequence, a live crab is found nestled in one of the many parcels of algae surrounding the Castilian vessels. Although it is utterly unclear what the Admiral’s plans for the specimen are, we are told that he saves it for a future occasion—perhaps to stave off a prospective famine aboard ship, to display as a natural curiosity, or to sell upon returning to Europe. If anything, the crab seems to affirm Columbus’s idea that the bundles of weed are conglomerates of land or fragments of islands approaching the expedition. The account escalates following this event into a succession of declarative statements in which, following Beatriz Pastor’s analysis, direct comparison, superlatives, and repetition become key rhetorical strategies in the narrative discourse of the Diario (1988, 35). Ocean waters grow in douceur, marine winds become decidedly gentler, almost breezy.5 A pod of dolphins catches the sailors’ attention. Similar to the marine flora and fauna previously encountered, these creatures too allow Columbus to extrapolate conclusions based on vague preconceptions. With each new development what were once timid hopes become undisputable certainty: land must be near. Incongruences are quickly dismissed. Major setbacks are reframed in such a way that they appear to fade into the day-to-day paltriness of the narrative. The whirlpool of blood left by the killing of a dolphin, for instance, is replaced by the image of a white seabird with elongated tail feathers overflying three forlorn Castilian ships, now restored to a place of power and enchantment.

Rescates and the material culture of the first contact On October 11, 1492, the first contact between the Spanish and the Taíno takes place on the island of Guanahaní.This encounter is immediately defined by the exchange of rescates, bartered objects such as red caps, beads, cotton thread, and spears that served to consolidate social and economic bonds between the two groups: I, he says, in order that they would be friendly to us—because I recognized that they were people who would be better freed [from error] and converted to our Holy Faith by love than by force—to some of them I gave red caps, and glass beads which they put 258

Material encounters

on their chests, and many other things of small value, in which they took so much pleasure and became so much our friends that it was a marvel. Later they came swimming to the ships’ launches where we were and brought us parrots and cotton threads in balls and javelins and many other things, and they traded them to us for other things which we gave them, such as small glass beads and bells. In sum, they took everything and gave of what they had very willingly. But it seemed to me that they were a people very poor in everything. (“Yo,” dize él,“porque nos tuviesen mucha amistad, porque cognoscí que era gente que mejor se libraría y convertiría a nuestra sancta fe con amor que no por fuerça, les di a algunos d’ellos unos bonetes colorados y unas cuentas de vidrio que se ponían al pescueço, y otras cosas muchas de poco valor, con que ovieron mucho plazer y quedaron tanto nuestros que era maravilla. Los cuales después venían a las barcas de los navíos adonde nos estávamos, nadando, y nos traían papagayos y hilo de algodón en ovillos y azagayas y otras cosas muchas, y nos las trocavan por otras cosas que nos les dávamos, como cuentezillas de vidrio y cascaveles. En fin, todo tomavan y daban de aquello que tenían de buena voluntad, mas me pareció que era gente muy pobre de todo….”) (Columbus 2005, 59) Through the practice known as rescatar, translated by Alessandra Russo as “to salvage” or “to recover,” trifles were exchanged for gold and land.6 The benefits of this mode of material and symbolic exchange were thus conceived as twofold. On the one hand, it helped Columbus and his Spanish cohort win the Natives’ trust and, on the other, it aimed to “recoup what had been invested in the expedition by bartering objects in an openly unequal exchange” (Russo 2011, 4). In many instances, the Natives approached the Spanish vessels in their canoes in order to get more trifles. Among the rescates offered by the Spaniards were also hawk bells, broken crockery, shards of glass, leather tags, and lace points. On very rare occasions, usually when interacting with a principal figure such as Guacanarí, the cacique of Hispaniola, this stock included objects of greater value such as a carnelian necklace, an ornate tapestry, and pieces of clothing.The social life of the objects offered by the Natives followed, in principle, a similar itinerary. Cotton balls, spears (azagayas), and foodstuffs were more commonly bartered, though to the delight of the Admiral nucay, the Arawak word for “gold,” and gold jewelry were occasionally part of the exchange as well. As several commentators have remarked, following Las Casas’s notes on the margins of Columbus’s manuscript, much of what was believed to be gold was in fact tumbaga or guanín, an alloy of gold, silver, and up to 60% copper that was imported from the South American mainland (the Taíno did not know the technique of melting metals) and magasita or fool’s gold (Saunders 1999, 246; Gužauskytė 2014, 97). In a second revealing episode from the post-“discovery” phase of the Diario, Columbus is made aware of the expediency with which the Indians traded the Spanish trifles among themselves, and across different islands.7 A mere four days after Columbus’s mistaken landfall, traces of European material culture penetrate the Antilles more rapidly than the Spanish expedition (Gruzinski 2001, 7–18; Russo 2011, 20). On his way to the island of Fernandina, Columbus comes across a man in a canoe who carries a basket with what Columbus presumes are Indigenous valuables (a piece of their bread, red earth, and tobacco leaves). To his surprise, this basket also carries glass beads and two Spanish coins (blancas). At other times, Columbus himself breaks the protocol of reciprocal exchange, but keeps up with the practice of giving the Indians something of little to no value in order to appear friendly. As José Piedra indicates, the Natives also “read” Columbus’s material desires, and are critical agents in the interpretive processes that 259

Raquel Albarrán

reorganize each group’s systems of value (1989, 52). On October 15 an Indian approaches the Spanish ships in order to barter a ball of cotton.When the man refuses to come inside, Columbus captures him and proceeds to give him a red cap, green glass beads, and a pair of hawk bells: And later I saw, on land, at the time of arrival of the other man—[the man] to whom I had given the things aforesaid and whose ball of cotton I had not wanted to take from him, although he wanted to give it to me—that all the others went up to him. He considered it a great marvel, and indeed it seemed to him that we were good people and that the other man who had fled had done us some harm and that for this we were taking him with us. And the reason that I behaved in this way toward him, ordering him set free and giving him the things mentioned, was in order that they would hold us in this esteem so that, when Your Highnesses some other time again send people here, the natives will receive them well.  And everything that I gave him was not worth four maravedíes. (Y vide después en tierra, al tiempo de la llegada del otro a quien yo avía dado las cosas susodichas y no le avía querido tomar el ovillo de algodón, puesto qu’el me lo quería dar, y todos los otros se llegaron a él, y tenía a gran maravilla, e bien le pareció que éramos buena gente, y que el otro que se avía fugido nos avía hecho algún daño, y que por esto lo llevábamos.Y a esta razón usé esto con él, de le mandar alargar, y le di las dichas cosas, porque nos tuviese en esta estima, porque otra vez cuando Vuestras Altezas aquí tornen a enbiar no hagan mala compañía; y todo lo que yo le di no valía cuatro maravedíes.) (Columbus 2005, 65) In reading this passage, the question that begs to be asked is why does Columbus reject the Indigenous ball of cotton? A speculative answer may note that by refusing reciprocity Columbus asserts his superiority, fashioning himself as a benefactor toward the Taíno. In failing to receive the object that the Indian has come to trade, he turns the Spanish rescates into gifts. In his groundbreaking work The Gift (1966), Marcel Mauss theorizes the gift as a powerful commodity and a social interaction that establishes hierarches between peoples and objects. Mauss observes that with the gift there comes a promise of another gift to be given or returned at a later date (1966, 9–16). Columbus does not accept the cotton ball, but this does not mean that he does not take, symbolically and materially, so much more. According to Vilches, the economy of the gift bridges Columbian notions of difference and value which stand in for “the wealth that Columbus promises but is not able to produce” (2004, 205). It is interesting to note that in the Diario the typical dyad of the gift—the giver and the receiver—is expanded to include a third agent in the dynamic of exchange: the Spanish monarchs. One-way exchange establishes a bond of promise, servitude, or debt that can only be repaid with a monumental offering. In refusing to accept the rescate Columbus effectively appropriates everything that surrounds it in the name of the monarchs, which are expected to claim, in person or by proxy, “the gift” that the Indians will give them: the full totality of the New World and every living and non-living, objectifiable and/or quantifiable entity it contains. This is explicitly stated a mere half a page later when another Indian comes into the presence of the Spaniards bringing tobacco leaves and other rescates. Once more, Columbus instructs his crew not to accept them, stating that the intention behind this action is so that the Indians may give everything to the Spaniards at a future date—“when Your Highnesses send [others] here, those who come will receive courteous treatment and the natives will give us of all that they may have” (“cuando Vuestras Altezas enbíen acá, que aquellos que vinieren resçiban honra y nos den de todo lo que oviere.” Columbus 260

Material encounters

2005, 66).The emphasis here in gaining and possessing the New World is made manifest through the material exchanges that take place—or fail to—between the Spaniards and the Taíno. The narrative of material possession and exchange runs parallel to the discourse and performance of territorial possession that Columbus documents during the early stages of the voyage, which grants him—as proxy for the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella—ownership of the lands and peoples of the Antilles. Columbus’s ritual of territorial possession begins, ceremoniously, on the day of his mistaken landfall: The Admiral brought out the royal banner and the captains two flags with the green cross, which the Admiral carried on all the ships as a standard, with an F and a Y, and over each letter a crown, one on one side of the + and the other on the other. Thus put ashore they saw very green trees and many ponds and fruits of various kinds. The Admiral called to the two captains and to the others who had jumped ashore and to Rodrigo Descobedo, the escrivano of the whole fleet, and to Rodrigo Sánchez de Segovia; and he said that they should be witnesses that, in the presence of all, he would take, as in fact he did take, possession of the said island for the king and for the queen his lords, making the declarations that were required, and which at more length are contained in the testimonials made there in writing. (Sacó el Almirante la vandera real y los capitanes con dos vanderas de la Cruz Verde, que llevava el Almirante en todos los navíos por seña, con una F y una I, ençima de cada letra su corona, una de un cabo de la + y otra de otro. Puestos en tierra vieron árboles muy verdes y aguas muchas y frutas de diversas maneras. El Almirante llamó a los dos capitanes y a los demás que saltaron en tierra, y a Rodrigo d’Escobedo escrivano de toda el armada, y a Rodrigo Sánches de Segovia, y dixo que le diesen por fe y testimonio cómo él por ante todos tomava, como de hecho tomó, possessión de la dicha isla por el Rey e por la Reina sus señores, haziendo las protestaciones que se requirían, como más largo se contiene en los testimonios que allí se hizieron por escripto.) (Columbus 2005, 59)8 But by October 15 this juridical performance, which renders land as both spatial object and uncontested property of the Spanish monarchs, conflates the search for riches with the geographic extension of the East Indies, now an operational archipelagic unit: And since from this island I saw another larger one to the west, I spread sail to go forward all that day until night because [otherwise] I would not yet have been able to reach the western cape of the island, to which island I gave the name Santa María de la Concepción. And close to sundown I anchored near the said cape in order to find out if there was gold there, because these men that I have had taken on the island of San Salvador kept telling me that there were very large bracelets of gold on their legs and on their arms. I well believe that all they were saying was a ruse in order to flee. Nevertheless, my intention was not to pass by any island of which I did not take possession, although if it is taken of one, it may be said that it is taken of all. (Y como d’esta isla vide otra mayor al Güeste, cargué las velas por andar todo aquel día fasta la noche, porque aún no pudiera aver andado al cabo del Güeste, a la cual puse nombre la isla de Sancta María de la Conçepçión; y cuasi al poner del sol sorgi açerca del dicho cabo por saber si avía allí oro, porque estos que yo avía hecho tomar en la isla 261

Raquel Albarrán

de San Salvador me dezían que aí traían manillas de oro muy grandes a las piernas y a los braços. Yo bien creí que todo lo que dezían era burla para se fugir. Con todo, mi voluntad era de no passar por ninguna isla de que no tomase possessión, puesto que, tomado de una, se puede decir de todas.) (Columbus 2005, 64, my emphasis) The use of the verb “to take” (tomar) here is significant. It inserts the islands (sometimes summarily identified from aboard the Spanish ships) in the chain of materialities that the Admiral “finds” and proceeds to confiscate, and connects the acts of preemptive material possession taking place during the 35-day journey across the Atlantic with the discourse of property that undergirds the post-“discovery” account of the Diario. As Consuelo Varela (2014) shows, in official writings following the first ship log, Columbus will establish himself as a “mediator” of New World materialities. Since the late fifteenth century, moving westward will circulate foodstuffs such as rice and sugar, clothing, needles, weapons, medicine, and some animals; from the New World will flow gold, silver, pearls, tobacco, spices, brazilwood, and cocoa beans, among other products (Varela 2014, 45). In both directions, Natives from Africa and the New World will be commodified as slaves and put to work upon materia prima.Though Columbus is only partially responsible, this is a story with monumental repercussions for our “Earth Island,” a term employed by Elizabeth DeLoughrey to provincialize our planetary imagination (2019, 8). Now more than ever, the material histories of small places such as the islands of the Caribbean invite us to consider the ways in which the various environmental and representational crises of the Anthropocene (the newly-declared geological age brought about by human activity) are, in great part, one and the same with the global history of domination inaugurated with early modern colonialism.

Colonial object ontologies In the 1950s, during the second wave of decolonization that swept the global south (MaldonadoTorres 2016), Frantz Fanon, the Black Martinican author and psychiatrist, critiqued the complicity of the object in the architecture of colonial life.  By likening his subaltern, racialized experience to that of “an object in the midst of other objects,” Fanon intimated that if there is one ontology that embodies the violent longue durée of colonialism and coloniality it is that of the object ([1952] 1967, 109). If for Fanon the coloniality of material objects spells dehumanization, for Columbus it articulates the original operations that ensure Spanish mastery over the new lands and its peoples. While buttressing the productive potential of material culture studies and new materialisms for the study of colonialism and coloniality, colonial object ontologies are a decolonial response to the long history of objectification of the (racialized) colonial subject, thus harnessing the resistance of the colonized to the dehumanizing force of colonial materiality. In allowing critiques such as Fanon’s to inform our readings of object cultures in the colonial world, vital space opens up between the study of material agency and the objectification of the oppressed, so that our work remains accountable to the differences and tensions between these unequal conditions of materialization. Reading Columbus against the grain of the objects encountered, exchanged, and possessed thus serves as a powerful heuristic device for animating the materiality of the encounter and the first exchanges between Europeans and Indigenous communities in the New World, and of the colonial world at large. So that instead of simply asking how colonial objects are negotiated by colonial subjects, or to what ends, we become open to noticing what is done to, through, and by different articulations of colonial mattering and objecthood (Mitchell 2005; Shomura 2017, ¶ 9). To be sure, this is an ontological question, as Fanon suggests, as much 262

Material encounters

as it is a methodological one. Material analyses within colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies, and elsewhere, invite us to cut across the methods that circumscribe modern disciplinary formations, in order to produce kaleidoscopic critiques that are better attuned to the enormity of the problems at hand. Although separated by more than four centuries and diametrically opposing ideological perspectives, Columbus and Fanon seem to coincide on the following: Colonialism thrives on objects; but objects, also, give shape to the experience of colonialism and its afterlives. Colonial objects are active instruments of empire’s reproducibility, and perhaps its final frontier. Through their physical, visual, and textual proliferation, obdurate presence, and trans-historical survival, colonial objects articulate countless possible human and more-thanhuman constellations of colonial experience that are as of yet unaccounted for.

Notes 1 For a summary and theorization of the processes that led to the institutionalization of material culture as a category of scholarly analysis, see the Introduction by Buchli (2002) to his edited volume. 2 Beyersdorff notes that there are informational gaps and important distinctions for the Relaciones produced in the viceroyalty of Peru: “It is uncertain how many of the survey reports were completed for the provinces of Peru and thereafter received by the Council of the Indies. As far as is known, the cabildo authorities of fourteen provinces composed relaciones of their respective jurisdictions between 1582 and 1586. However, none of these reports, known as the Relaciones Geográficas de Indias: Perú, apparently, included the traza [urban grid] of surveyed towns and territory in Peru as required in assignment ten” (2007, 133). 3 All English translations of the ship’s log come from Dunn and Kelley (1991). 4 Zamora contextualizes Columbus’s voyage as a spiritual narrative in which Columbus usurps the place of Christ: “The journey became an imitatio Christi, carried out not only in the name of Christ but in the same evangelical manner of traveling undertaken by the Savior himself ” (1993, 97). 5 Rabasa discusses Columbus’s use of the term dulzura in the first chapter of Inventing America (1993, 68). 6 Varela notes that the term rescate was also used in Columbus’s 1492 capitulación (license, charter) to refer to the slave trade of Caribbean Natives (2014, 44). 7 Anthropologists Cassá (1974) and Helms (1988) study pre-Hispanic trade and hierarchies of value in the Americas and the Circum-Caribbean. From an archaeological standpoint, important research has shed light on the trade networks and societal structures established by Native groups; see Cody (1990) and Crock and Petersen (2004). 8 The acts of possession performed by Columbus anticipate the juridical logic of the Requerimiento. In the context of this document, Seed (1995) studies the “ceremonies of possession” that provided the rationale for “just war” or conquest. Beyond its discursive aspects,Wilson and Elliot give us insight into how conquistadors behaved on the ground, so to speak. Many improvised and original practices surfaced in the performance of possession, from planting a cross, flowing banners, and naming, as does Columbus, to cutting trees, meeting with Indigenous chiefs, and erecting Spanish camps (Wilson 2002, 155; Elliot 2006, 31).

Works cited Albarrán, Raquel. 2016. “Colonial Assemblages: Objects, Territories, and Racialized Subjects in PreIndependence Latin America (1492–1810).” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania. Allewaert, Monique. 2013. Ariel’s Ecology: Plantation, Personhood, and Colonialism in the American Tropics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1986. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. London: Cambridge University Press. Arrom, José Juan. 1989. Mitología y artes prehispánicas de las antillas. Mexico City: Siglo XXI. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barnard, Mary E., and Frederick De Armas, eds. 2013. “Preface.” In Objects of Culture in the Literature of Imperial Spain, ix–xxi. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

263

Raquel Albarrán Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press. Bentancor, Orlando. 2017. The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Beyersdorff, Margot. 2007. “Covering the Earth: Mapping the Walkabout in Andean Pueblos de Indios.” Latin American Research Review 42 (3): 129–160. Bigelow, Allison. 2020. Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World. Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and University of North Carolina Press. Bleichmar, Daniela, and Peter C. Mancall, eds. 2011. “Introduction.” In Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, 1–14. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bogost, Ian. 2012. Alien Phenomenology: Or What’s It Like to Be a Thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brokaw, Galen. 2010. A History of the Khipu. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brown, Bill. 2003. A Sense of Things:The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bryant, Levi. 2011. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press. Buchli,Victor, ed. 2002. “Introduction.” In The Material Culture Reader, 1–22. Oxford: Berg Publishers. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. London: Routledge. Bynum, Caroline W. 2011. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. New York: Zone Books. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. 2001. How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Cassá, Roberto. 1974. Los taínos de la Española. Santo Domingo: Editora de la Universidad Autónoma de Santo Domingo. Césaire, Aimé. [1950] 2001. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press. Chanlatte Baik, Luis A. 1976. Cultura igneri: investigaciones arqueológicas en Guayanilla, Puerto Rico. Santo Domingo: Museo del Hombre Dominicano y Fundación García Arévalo. Chen, Mel Y. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham: Duke University Press. Cody, Ann K. 1990. “Prehistoric Patterns of Exchange in the Lesser Antilles: Materials, Models, and Preliminary Observations.” MA thesis, San Diego State University. Columbus, Christopher. 2005. Los cuatro viajes. Testamento. Edited by Consuelo Varela. Madrid: Alianza Editorial. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. 2010. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics, 1–43. Durham: Duke University Press. Cornejo-Polar, Antonio. 1994. Escribir en el aire: Ensayo sobre la heterogeneidad socio-cultural en las literaturas andinas. Lima: Editorial Horizonte. Crock, John G., and James B. Petersen. 2004. “Inter-Island Exchange, Settlement Hierarchy, and TaínoRelated Chiefdom in the Anguilla Bank, Northern Lesser Antilles.” In Late Ceramic Age Societies in the Eastern Caribbean, edited by André Delpuesh and Corinne L. Hofman, 139–156. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports. Cummins,Thomas B.F.  2002. Toasts with the Inca: Andean Abstraction and Colonial Images on Quero Vessels. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Curet, L. Antonio. 2011. “Colonialism and the History of Archaeology in the Spanish Caribbean.” In Comparative Archaeologies: A Sociological View of the Science of the Past, edited by Ludomir R. Lozny, 641– 671. New York: Springer. Deagan, Kathleen, and José M. Cruxent. 2002. Columbus’s Outpost among the Taínos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493–1498. New Haven:Yale University Press. Dean, Carolyn. 2014. “Reviewing Representation: The Subject-Object in Pre-Hispanic and Colonial Inka Visual Culture.” Colonial Latin American Review 23 (3): 298–319. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. 2019. Allegories of the Anthropocene, 1–32. Durham: Duke University Press. Del Valle, Ivonne. 2009. “On Shaky Ground: Hydraulics, State Formation, and Colonialism in SixteenthCentury Mexico.” Hispanic Review 77 (2): 197–220. Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin, eds. 2012. New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press. Dunn, Oliver, and James E. Kelley, Jr, trans. 1991. The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492–1493. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

264

Material encounters Elliott,  John H. Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492–1830. 2006. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fanon, Frantz. [1952] 1967. Black Skin,White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Fernández Méndez, Eugenio. 1972. Art and Mythology of the Taino Indians of the Greater West Indies. San Juan: Ediciones El Cemí. Ferreira da Silva, Denise. 2017. “1 (Life) ÷ 0 (Blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter beyond the Equation of Value.” e-flux 79, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/79/94686/1-life-0-blackness-or-onmatter-beyond-the-equation-of-value/. Gužauskytė, Evelina. 2014. Christopher Columbus’s Naming in the diarios of the Four Voyages (1492–1504). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gruzinski, Serge. 2001. Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner (1492–2019). Durham: Duke University Press. Hall, Kim F. 1995. Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Haraway, Donna. 2004. “Introduction: A Kingship of Feminist Figurations.” In The Haraway Reader, 1–6. New York: Routledge. Harman, Graham. 2002. Tool-Beings: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court. Helms, Mary. 1988. Ulysses’ Sail: An Ethnographic Odyssey of Power, Knowledge, and Geographical Distance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hoyos, Héctor. 2019. Things with a History:Transcultural Materialism and Literature of Extraction in Contemporary Latin America. New York: Columbia University Press. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2016. “Colonialism, Neocolonial, Internal Colonialism, the Postcolonial, Coloniality, and Decoloniality.” In Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought: Historical and Institutional Trajectories, edited by Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, and Marisa Belausteguigoitia, 67–78. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Mauss, Marcel. 1966. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. London: Cohen and West. Mazzotti, José Antonio. 1996. Coros mestizos del Inca Garcilaso: Resonancias andinas. Lima: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Mitchell,W. J.T. 2005. What Do Pictures Want?:The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. More, Anna H. 2013. Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mundy, Barbara E., and Dana Leibsohn. 2012. “History from Things: Indigenous Objects and Colonial Latin America.” World History Connected 9 (2), https://worldhistoryconnected.press.uillinois.edu/9.2/ forum_mundy.html. Nemser, Daniel. 2017. Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ortiz, Fernando. [1940] 1978. Contrapunteo del tabaco y el azúcar. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho. Pastor, Beatriz. 1988. Discursos narrativos de la conquista: mitificación y emergencia. Hanover: Ediciones del Norte. Piedra, José. 1989. “The Game of Critical Arrival.” Diacritics 19 (1): 33–61. Prescott, William H. 1843. History of the Conquest of Mexico and History of the Conquest of Peru. New York: The Modern Library. Price, Rachel. 2014. The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba, Brazil, and Spain, 1868–1968. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Rabasa, José. 1993. Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. ———. 2000. Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest. Durham: Duke University Press. Rappaport, Joanne. 1994. “Object and Alphabet: Andean Indians and Documents in the Colonial Period.” In Writing without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes, edited by Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter D. Mignolo, 271–291. Durham: Duke University Press. Rodríguez Ramos, Reniel. 2010. Rethinking Puerto Rican Precolonial History. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press. Russo, Alessandra. 2011. “Cortés’s Objects and the Idea of New Spain.” Journal of the History of Collections 23 (3): 1–24.

265

Raquel Albarrán ———. 2014. The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain, 1500–1600. Austin: University of Texas Press. Salomon, Frank. 2004. The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village. Durham: Duke University Press. Saldanha, Arun. 2007. Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Saunders, Nicholas J. 1999. “Biographies of Brilliance: Pearls, Transformations of Matter and Being, c. AD 1492.” World Archaeology 31 (2): 243–257. Seed, Patricia. 1995. Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shomura, Chad. 2017. “Exploring the Promise of New Materialisms.” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 6 (1), https://csalateral.org/issue/6-1/forum-alt-humanities-new-materalist-philosophypromise-new-materialisms-shomura/. Swift, Ellen. 2007. “Decorated Vessels:The Function of Decoration in Late Antiquity.” In Objects in Context, Objects in Use: Material Spatiality in Late Antiquity, edited by Luke Lavan, Ellen Swift, and Toon Putzeys, 385–409. Leiden: Brill. TallBear, Kim. 2015. “An Indigenous Reflection on Working beyond the Human/Not Human.” GLQ 21 (2–3): 230–235. Tsing, Anna L. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Varela, Consuelo. 2014. “The Difficult Beginnings: Columbus as a Mediator of New World Products.” In Global Goods and the Spanish Empire, 1492–1824: Circulation, Resistance and Diversity, edited by Bethany Aram and Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, 38–52. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Verdesio, Gustavo. 2001. “Forgotten Territorialities: The Materiality of Indigenous Pasts.” Nepantla: Views from South 2 (1): 85–114. Vilches, Elvira. 2004. “Columbus’s Gift: Representations of Grace and Wealth and the Enterprise of the Indies.” MLN 119 (2): 201–225. ———. 2010. New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Walker, Tamara. 2017. Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, Diana de Armas. 2002. “Cervantes and the New World.” In The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, edited by Anthony Cascardi, 206–225. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument.” CR:The New Centennial Review 3 (3): 257–337. Zamora, Margarita. 1993. Reading Columbus. Berkeley: University of California Press. Zuese, Alicia R. 2015. Baroque Spain and the Writing of Visual and Material Culture. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

266

15 IT COMES WITH THE TERRITORY Indigenous materialities and Western knowledge Gustavo Verdesio

In the last three decades, colonial Latin American studies produced by language and literature scholars have thrived.They have produced a significant amount of serious, innovative, and sometimes inspiring work. However, since at least 2001, the field has been criticized for having paid too much attention to symbolic systems and textual evidence, forgetting about the enormous realm of material culture (Verdesio 2001a). Very recently, a few (that is, not too many) studies have paid heed to that criticism and have focused on material aspects of the colonial period (Del Valle 2009; Arias 2010; Vilches 2010; Bentancor 2017; Nemser 2017). However, if what one wants is to learn about indigenous material culture in particular, one still needs to look elsewhere. That is why in this chapter I am going to review some of the ways in which other disciplines administer what is known and what can be said about the indigenous past through the study of its materiality. In what follows, we will get a general idea of the research inspired by phenomena characterized by a material foundation, such as stone architecture and monumentality, diverse forms of organizing and exploiting the land, and different kinds of indigenous objects. Toward the end of the chapter, I will discuss the ways in which a study that includes not only indigenous material cultures of the past but their own bodies as well, has helped me to better understand both the colonial past of what today is the State of Uruguay, and its present. In order to show how this move has affected my academic practice, I will discuss the repatriation of indigenous human remains, and the reemergence of the Charrua Indians in the last decade of the twentieth century. Because some have wondered about the relationship between those forays into both the remote past and the present, I promise to explain (after we discuss the research produced in the last few decades on indigenous material culture) the reasons behind this move that has occupied the last two decades of my research agenda.

Indigenous material cultures Yet, before commenting on specific investigations, let us briefly reflect on the implicit foundations that legitimate and give credibility to the enterprise of reconstructing the past of indigenous societies. The foundation for the extravagant pretense of recovering a human trajectory in 267

Gustavo Verdesio

the form of a narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end, comes from the idea that there is such a thing as a world. This idea has a lot in common with Martin Heidegger’s concept of world, where human beings and objects are part of a network comprised by a high number of entities that, as a whole, generate a universe of meaning (Inwood 1997, 32). The name of that universe of meaning is “world.” It is that totality that gives meaning to individual entities. The world, then, is a horizon of understanding (Heidegger 2003, section III of the First Part; Blattner 2008, 63). It is only by accepting this premise that scholars can postulate the possibility of reconstructing, out of some of its fragments (i.e., objects and pieces of objects), the complete story of a specific society from the past. By themselves, those fragments do not mean much. This is an idea shared by archaeologist Margaret Conkey, who states that artifacts and things do not have an existence isolated from the human world, but they are immersed in a social context (Conkey 1999, 140). It is thanks to their belonging to a universe of meaning that one can shed light on theirs. It is from this cognitive position, I insist, that scholars believe that the reconstruction of past worlds through the interpretation of its material remains is possible. My intention is not to debate this assumption, but simply to state that it is the notion that underlies most historical and archaeological endeavors. In the following pages, we will see several attempts to unearth (this is not just a metaphor) societies and epochs from material fragments.

Monumentality, architecture, and the organization and exploitation of the land Perhaps the indigenous material objects that have attracted more attention in the history of Western disciplines are monuments. This also applies to non-indigenous societies from the past such as Rome, Greece, and Egypt, among others. This phenomenon is to be expected, for those constructions were built precisely with the intention of making a lasting impression on potential (present and future) observers. Monuments do not only guide the gaze; they also organize the territory. They are territorial markers that provide symbolic content to social life. Once the societies that built them disappear, those sites continue to provide meaning for both locals and visitors, as well as for scholars and laypersons. This is why both archaeologists and the general public have paid special attention to places like Machu Picchu or Chichen Itza, where Andean and Mesoamerican architecture exhibit their greatness and beauty. However, although some of those sites, like Machu Picchu, were “discovered” over a century ago (1911), it was only in the 1980s that serious studies of the site started to shed light on its nature. From the time when Hiram Bingham found the ruins (thanks to his Native guides, who appear in the photographs of the expedition, but are not mentioned in his writings), lots of nonsense has been said about them, including his first hypothesis: that the site was Vilcabamba, the last redoubt of the Incas who resisted the Spanish forces that occupied Cuzco. In fact, despite the solid conclusions reached by some of the most rigorous studies of the last three decades (like the ones that appear in the book edited by Richard L. Burger and Lucy C. Salazar (2004), a good part of the public continues to believe that the site hosts a city (and a lost one, at that) instead of a royal estate (something like an Inca Camp David) built by Inca Pachacuti. The persistence of these misconceptions might be explained by, among other causes, the insistence of many of the site’s guides on repeating them to exhaustion. This kind of place attracts first world visitors in search of spiritual (sometimes mystical) experiences, intoxicated with that messy mix of ideas known as New Age, where oriental religions coexist with indigenous peoples’ beliefs. This is wonderfully portrayed in the film co-directed by anthropologist Quetzil Castañeda1 and Jeffrey D. Himpele, where one can see all kinds of tourists in search of contact with superior spirits and/or extraterrestrial beings (Himpele and Castañeda  1997). 268

It comes with the territory

This is a phenomenon common to other ruins like Machu Picchu, according to Jorge A. Flores Ochoa (2004). In this kind of place, one can find guides announcing the possibility of making contact with superior beings from other galaxies, while others present the construction of the site as a bilateral effort between aliens and Incas. It seems reasonable to attribute these theories to the pervasive prejudice that prevents average Western citizens from believing that societies that did not use iron, beasts of burden, or the wheel could have achieved such heights in architecture and engineering—it is difficult for them to understand that Natives could have reached certain results through means different from the ones used by Western societies. There are studies, like Lisa Breglia’s Monumental Ambivalence, that discuss policies on the conservation of heritage sites like the aforementioned Chichen Itza. In Breglia’s interpretation of the possible motivations of a significant number of the tourists, she suggests that what constitutes their pleasure has its foundation in the hermetic containment of the site, that separates them from the daily lives of the Maya of the present (2006, 101). But said pleasure is also made possible by the efforts deployed by the machinery of tourism to hide the conditions of production of the archaeological site (Breglia 2006, 101). In this way, the tourist is liberated from seeing that there is a reterritorialization of the site that hides a reality that Breglia describes as “Mayas reconstructing Maya ruins” (Breglia 2006, 101). The commodification of the site is what hides the Maya workers’ labor involved in the production of the site (Breglia 2006, 101). We are before a materiality that is not innocent: it is a space produced both to generate economic profit and to strengthen national patrimonial discourses. It is also a space, as Himpele says in minute 9:00 of the film he co-directed with Castañeda, in which archaeologists cleared the jungle to build ruins (those modern replicas of Maya ancient cities), presenting them as empty, vast ceremonial centers (Himpele and Castañeda 1997). The intervention of archaeologists in this landscape was not limited to clearing the vegetation: as Castañeda says (in minute 8:00 of the film, pointing to a wall that visitors believe to be ancient), construction elements were added to shore up the buildings that were being affected by the high number of tourists (Himpele and Castañeda 1997). According to Castañeda, “archaeologists literally carved Chichen Itza out of puro monte (out of the “pure jungle”), as the locals today proclaim, and inscribed their vision of the Maya onto the jungle, creating ‘ruins’” (Castañeda 1996, 104).The author states that those “ruins” are not built only of material remains of excavated and restored buildings and artifacts: the remaining trees were carefully selected, the discarded stones too, paths and tourist stands were built, and garbage cans were placed, in order to become an integral part of the site (Castañeda 1996, 98). Maybe because of all this, Lynn Stephen says, in a review of Castañeda’s book, that we are before a site reconstructed in a hyper-real fashion that can be considered “a life-sized scale-model replica of Chichen Itza as itself ” (1997, 781). This construction process allowed the Western imagination to conceive of this area as a city built by the indigenous peoples of the past. In this way, researchers made the emergence of a new object of study possible and prompted the creation of a series of archaeological sites. This might be a good place to remember that the desire to produce objects of knowledge can be fulfilled thanks to a power differential that, as Edward Said explained a long time ago, makes it possible for the Western observer to place her or himself in a privileged position vis-à-vis the others being observed (1978). That is to say, there are geopolitical situations in which certain society is able to produce knowledge on its others.This kind of production of knowledge is unidirectional and ignores the opinions of the peoples being observed, which are usually dismissed as folklore or superstition. One of the things to which we should pay attention in this type of site open to the public is the way in which space is regulated through the establishment of restrictions and liberties for the visitors in relation to their interactions with monuments and other objects in the site 269

Gustavo Verdesio

(Breglia 2006, 109–110). All archaeological sites have rules to control access and circulation, and one can find signs with instructions and warnings for the visitors. This conditions not only the way in which we see the material culture of indigenous societies of the past, but also the way in which we relate to it. An extreme case is the archaeological site known as The Octagon, in Newark, Ohio, a monumental mound complex (earthen constructions of conical shape) built in the period known as Hopewell (2100 BP–1500 BP), that contains, among other constructions, an observatory from which the moonrise can be seen. In 1910 it was leased to the Moundbuilders Country Club, which developed the site as a golf course. (The lease, renewed by the State of Ohio in 1997, will continue until at least 2078). For this reason, the site remains closed to the general public most of the time; it can be visited on only four days per year: April 8 and 9, July 30, and October 7 (Ohio History Connection 2018), which is unacceptable for a place that should be considered as part of the heritage of Native American peoples. This author was able to visit the site on two occasions, confirming that even when visiting the site, freedom of movement is rather limited—not so much for golf players, who are allowed to play among the ancient mounds. This tendency to regulate the practice of space unevenly is a way of exerting control over a territoriality that precedes the arrival of Europeans in the Americas. The control of the territoriality of the other can be seen also in other mound sites like Chillicothe, Moundville, and others that I have been able to visit. They all have signs with instructions that regulate the practice of space, hierarchizing some places over others. These regulations are dispositives to ensure that those sites mean exactly what the state wants them to mean, and that they are practiced in a manner that is acceptable for whatever national narratives they intend to reinforce. In this case, one can see how the nation-state appropriates an indigenous site as heritage, in a way that prevents the descendants of its builders from even accessing it. The resignification of the site as a golf course necessitates an authoritarian control of the space that makes sure that most indigenous meanings are erased from its surface. It should be noted that mounds can be found in the Midwest, the American Bottom, and the Southeast of the United States. From the first impressions of Western observers, who thought they were the product of the efforts of groups as different as the Phoenicians, the Vikings, the Lost Tribe of Israel, and extraterrestrials (Silverberg 1986), there was a tendency to deny the agency of local indigenous peoples, for, according to said observers, those societies could not have built such impressive works. Perhaps this is a good moment to say a couple of words about some of the reasons that may be behind the incredulity of Western observers before the works built by indigenous peoples from the past. One of the most determinant ones is an evolutionary conception that animates many of our opinions and ideas. In the main narrative of this conception of the history of the species, the forms of human social organization are seen as part of an ascending path, as if humans were climbing a ladder that goes from the simplest forms of organization to the most complex ones. In this narrative, simple equals inferior or primitive and complex means superior or civilized. But this evolutionary narrative, as Norman Yoffee has persuasively argued, has never been confirmed by the archaeological record—he has not been able to find, for example, a chiefdom that turned into a state (2005, 31).This is, according to him, just a myth among those who have dedicated their careers to studying ancient societies. However, myths are persistent and, because of their existence, humans in general, and indigenous peoples in particular, who organize themselves in small groups of high mobility, are viewed by the Western gaze as groups that rank very low on the evolutionary scale or, even worse, as relicts from the past of the species. As Johannes Fabian (1983) has rightfully pointed out, they are denied coevalness and they are placed automatically in the past, which is particularly aberrant when it comes to indigenous peoples of the present. Unfortunately, this still happens in the work of archaeologists and other scholars who study the past of indigenous societies. 270

It comes with the territory

It is probably unfair to mention the work of one author in particular, but because it is used in many undergraduate classes across the United States, I am going to briefly refer to Michael E. Moseley’s The Incas and Their Ancestors (2001). This book offers a panoramic view of Andean archaeology, in which the author, after discussing the geophysical characteristics and ecology of the region, offers, in chapter III, a description of what he calls “The Inca Model of Statecraft,” which reviews Inca conceptions about the cosmos, a description of the system of social organization known as ayllu, and the Inca statecraft proper (2001, 51–86). It is only after describing the ways in which the Inca had control of the territory and its inhabitants that he discusses, chronologically, what archaeologists have called periods, each one of which has a proper name (Early Horizon, Early Intermediate, Middle Horizon, etc.) and specific archaeological records. Interestingly, while he analyzes the distinctive traits of each period, the author emphasizes the importance of some of them, for they were later appropriated by the Inca and used to build their statecraft model or to enrich their material culture. In this narrative, each significant trait acquires importance only if it has become a contribution to the glory of the Inca. This goes to show us that even when serious scholars talk about indigenous societies they run the risk of falling into a perspective that postulates a sort of progression toward a more perfect, more civilized form of social organization. In this case, the civilization forged by the Inca, described at the beginning of the book, becomes the highest point of a historical trajectory whose only telos was to lead to the Inca state. Indigenous monumentality has also been studied by other disciplines besides archaeology. For example, art historian Carolyn Dean has attempted to interpret what she calls a culture of stone. In her homonymous book, she investigates Andean perspectives on stones, articulated through the rocks themselves as well as through Andean stories about stones (2010). In so doing, she issues a caveat: the need to avoid the aesthetic criterion used by Western culture to study the Andean constructions made of stone (2010, 1). Instead, she proposes a challenge: to imagine stones as Andean peoples of the past did (5). One of the things that need to be taken into account in that endeavor is that, in that conceptual universe, stones were viewed as sentient and as connected to life in a complementary relationship: living beings can be turned into stone and stones can become living beings (5). In that world, stones were viewed as inhabitants or owners of villages and places with whom it was possible to have relationships and conversations, whom it was necessary to feed, and, sometimes, also to dress (8). Dean’s book is innovative, and it is full of sharp and surprising observations, but it has a problem: its data sources. The sources are the stones themselves, ethnographic studies of the present, and colonial chronicles produced by Spanish observers. It could be argued that it is absolutely necessary to resort to the latter in order to understand the peoples of the region who did not leave intelligible records about their beliefs and cultural practices. Yet, it is undeniable, as Dean herself acknowledges, that Europeans were not able to comprehend their Andean informants (Dean 2010, 19). In spite of this, her work can be placed among the most suggestive on the material world of ancient societies. A research project that questions the reliability of colonial chronicles for the study of preColumbian societies is the one led by Michael A. Malpass, who organized a volume (Provincial Inca) that combined the study of the colonial ethnographical record and the excavation of sites. The idea behind the project was to see how rigorous colonial texts were in relation to the control exerted by the Inca in different provincial sites, using archaeology as an independent method of verification (Malpass 1993, ix). Malpass asked himself: “Were large polities such as the Chimu incorporated in the same fashion and according to the same rules as small ones like the Uru? Were there distinctions among different areas with respect to imperial administration?” (Malpass 1993, 8). In order to find out, scholars had to define what Inca culture is, who and/or what its markers were or, more difficult yet, how to recognize them archaeologically (Malpass 1993, 8). The Inca material culture elements they took into account are related to architecture, the settlement plan, 271

Gustavo Verdesio

engineering works, pottery, and a few other artifacts (Malpass 1993, 9). For example, they took into account the housing complex known as kancha, which consisted in a series of houses placed around a courtyard, as well as the long, rectangular hall known as kallanka (Malpass 1993, 9). The results were very interesting, because the excavations showed the limitations and the lack of reliability of the sources: some Inca settlements that the chronicles present as vital administrative centers appear unimportant after the archaeological investigations. And, on the contrary, some settlements considered as of lesser importance by the documents exhibit a greater deployment of administrative control by the Incas. Finally, the book, based on the different degrees of presence of Inca material culture in the diverse places under their control, reaches the conclusion that there was significant variability in the way in which the Inca administered them (Malpass 1993, 11).2 Studies on the materiality of other indigenous spaces of high visibility are abundant. For example, in the Andean region, the Nazca lines and the ceques of Cuzco have received significant attention,3 and agricultural systems have been abundantly studied.4 For lack of space, I will only mention some studies on the exploitation of the land in the Amazon basin. For a long time, it was believed that silviculture was a human nineteenth-century invention. However, recent studies conducted in tropical landscapes indicate that many of those places considered as natural r­ ainforests are, in actuality, the result of human practices. Charles Peters has studied several sites and has found evidence of human manipulation. In order to see those human activities not visible at a glance (due to the ideological blindspots of Western observers), Peters needed to modify his perceptual habits (2000). That was what allowed him to find clear evidence of human agency in the land in the form of home gardens kept by the nuclear family, managed fallows, and the most difficult to see human-made landscapes: managed forests (Peters 2000, 205–214). According to Balee (Raffles and Winkler Prins 2003), approximately 12% of the Amazonian rainforest is of biocultural origin. Unfortunately, according to David Lentz, researchers today share an idea (a prejudice) on that kind of landscape: that nature was, before the arrival of Europeans, pristine, untouched by humans (2000). That idea, according to Raffles and Winkler Prins, presents indigenous peoples as passive subjects, incapable of producing substantial changes in that vast and overwhelming landscape (2003, 166, 168). This is in tune with another Western belief that Michel de Certeau discussed many years ago: the image of America as a blank page (a passive entity) waiting for the European subject (the one with agency) to arrive and leave an imprint (1988, xxv). Against this myth, studies that show human agency in the Amazonian landscape propose a different relationship between indigenous peoples and nature, emphasizing the material modification of the landscape performed by them. These cases, if viewed from the right perspective, can teach us a couple of things about what we can and cannot see—about something we could call regimes of visibility: the rules that condition our gaze and, therefore, have an impact on what we can and cannot perceive. It is especially relevant to be aware of these regimes of visibility when one is trying to identify indigenous materialities, for, as we have seen, one is less prone, due to ideological bias, to recognize human agency when the actors are indigenous peoples (Verdesio 2010a, 343, 347).

Objects A survey of indigenous materialities of the past would not be complete without a reference to the research dedicated to the non-monumental objects produced by indigenous peoples. The number of books and articles produced by ethnohistorians and archaeologists is too great to be reviewed here. For this reason, I am going to pay special attention to those that have studied the ways in which indigenous peoples recorded information in the past. I am referring to record-keeping devices such as Mesoamerican codices and the stellae of Mayan monuments. 272

It comes with the territory

The research produced on those objects has laid bare some of our most persistent beliefs and prejudices about the intellectual capabilities of indigenous peoples. A good start for the exploration of the growing field of alternative literacies is the pioneering book Writing without Words, co-edited by Elizabeth Hill Boone and Walter Mignolo. Two of the assumptions the collection intended to disprove were: the belief that writing equals recorded oral discourse (Boone and Mignolo 1996, 5) and the one that proposes an evolutionary narrative that shows how from the most “primitive” recording systems, societies keep creating more sophisticated ones until they reach the perfection achieved by the best of them all: the alphabetic one (Boone and Mignolo 1996, 6). The problem with the evolutionary model that sees the human universe that way is that it is not universal: there have been independent local developments that are unrelated to Western history (Boone and Mignolo 1996, 13). Against this kind of conception, the definition of writing Boone proposes in the introduction of the book is broader and more inclusive: writing “is the communication of relatively specific ideas in a conventional manner by means of permanent, visible marks” (Boone and Mignolo 1996, 15). In the book we find a number of studies that give an idea of, but do not exhaust, the great variety of approaches that have developed in the field in the last three decades: literacy among the ancient Maya, readings of specific codices (for example, Cospi), the body in Mixtec writing, Nahua cartographic histories, and several others. Let us focus on the research on Mesoamerican codices, studied from the beginning of colonial times. These are long folded sheets containing a semasiographic form of writing, which comprises ideographic signs that do not correspond to a phonetic, living language.They are made, depending on their origin (Mixtec, Maya, or Nahuatl), of the fiber from the agave plant or of bark paper from the fig tree or amatl. The many efforts made to decipher the Maya code are exemplary for the understanding of the aforementioned Western prejudices about indigenous people’s intellectual prowess. In his Breaking the Maya Code, Michael Coe discusses the many failed attempts at the interpretation of these codices, laying bare the interpretive limitations of Western scholars for the understanding of other cultures’ achievements. Throughout his book, we see a large number of researchers proposing all kinds of hypotheses, some of them ridiculous (like those advanced by the Jesuit Atanasius Kircher (1602–1680), who believed in the relationship between Egyptian hieroglyphs and Maya writing) and some of them rational and productive (Coe 1999). During that process, cultural prejudice and racism played a fundamental role in the academic endeavors in the field of Maya studies. An interesting case is Eric Thompson, a very influential British scholar whose view of the Maya portrayed them as a peaceful society ruled by benevolent sages who spent most of their time watching the skies. He used all his power to fight and ridicule the ideas held by a soviet scholar, Yuri Knorosov, who suggested that in order to understand the Maya writing system, it was necessary to postulate that it has a phonological aspect—that is to say, that some of the signs in that writing represent sounds existent in a spoken language. Interestingly, this intuition is the same held centuries ago by Bishop de Landa (the religious authority responsible for the burning of a significant number of Maya codices), but nobody seemed to have taken it seriously. Thanks to Thompson’s animadversion to Knorosov, the decipherment of the Maya code was delayed for decades. However, as Coe underscores, history agreed with the soviet scholar: the studies by David Stuart, the American Champollion, confirmed the existence of phonetical elements in Maya writing. Yet, it would be unfair to blame Thompson’s actions exclusively for the delay in the decipherment of the Maya code, for it is also possible to blame a prejudice, prevalent among scholars, against the potential relevance of the Maya speakers of the present for the decipherment of the writing system created and used by their ancestors. Sadly, they were never consulted about it. 273

Gustavo Verdesio

This is the story of how the phonetic element of Maya writing was discarded and the investigations were conducted behind the backs of speakers of the language. Once again, as in the case of Amazonian silviculture, we see how the Western gaze ignores the agency of ancient indigenous societies and indigenous peoples today. The list of indigenous objects studied by Western institutions and disciplines is very long. This means I am not going to be able to talk about some significant ones, such as khipu,5 pottery, lithic industries, or Thomas B.F. Cummins’s important book about keros, a type of wooden drinking vessel (2002). Nor am I going to talk about the territorial representations produced by indigenous peoples, such as the ones contained in the Relaciones Geográficas.6 I am going to discuss, instead, those indigenous objects stored and exhibited in museums and universities. But before I do that, I will have recourse to Heidegger’s ideas in “The Thing,” where he talks about the thingness (that is, what makes a thing be that particular thing and not something else) of a specific object: a jug. According to him, the jug’s thingness lies in its condition as a vessel: we are going to notice what that thing is when we fill it (Heidegger 1971, 168, 169). I, instead, would like to talk about a different object: a specific indigenous pipe coming from the excavation of a funerary site. In this case, we can say it is a pipe if we can fill it with tobacco and smoke it. If that thing is in a museum showcase, it cannot be considered as a pipe, for it has lost, at least temporarily, its thingness—that is, it cannot be used as what it is. Being exhibited in a museum prevents it from fulfilling the functions for which it was built: to be smoked and, in this case, to lie on a grave next to the remains of a human being. In order to illustrate my argument, I will refer to an anecdote (that I owe to John Low, personal communication, 2012) that took place a few years ago in the anthropology museum of one of the most prestigious universities in the United States. In that museum there was a pipe exhibited in a showcase. This situation propitiated a reaction from a Native American visitor, who, carrying his drum, started to visit the museum every day as a sign of protest. On one of those days, one of the employees approached him and, after long deliberations, the museum decided to retire the pipe from the showcase. The Native American visitor argued that the pipe (which exhibited a clear cracking but was repaired by the museum’s technicians), in his cultural tradition, needs to be stored with the parts separated: to put it together was a sort of desecration—not to mention the act of excavating the grave and exhibiting the object. After a quick consultation of the records that accompany the artifacts stored in the museum, and to add insult to injury, employees found that the parts put together did not belong to the same pipe. This story illustrates, I believe, an attitude typical of our culture, which consists in representing indigenous objects not so much as how they are but as how we think they must be. In this case, somebody from the museum thought that it was not a good idea to exhibit a broken pipe, deciding to put it together—probably in order to make it more presentable. This is a clear violation not only of the ends for which the pipe was made (the uses for which it was destined) but also of the morphological status of the object when it was found: the parts of the pipe needed to remain apart for the rest of its social life. What happened at that museum was possible only because of the great power differential that exists between the culture that produced the pipe and the one that attributes itself the right to exhibit it. In some cases, indigenous objects are exhibited as art, which operates a distortion of the object’s ontological status, of its morphology (as in the case of the pipe), and its functions (it cannot perform the ones for which it was made, for it lies in a showcase that protects it as an artistic object). In other words, the exhibition of the artifact is staged from the perspective of Western categories that have nothing to do with the values and principles that ruled the indigenous world that produced that object.

274

It comes with the territory

The materiality of the indigenous past (and present) in Uruguay I started to develop an interest in the study of indigenous materialities about a couple of decades ago. I was a little bothered by the disparity between my knowledge of European cultural traditions and my knowledge of indigenous ones.The consequence of this state of affairs was that my work on past territorial practices on the lands that are controlled today by the Uruguayan state was quite slanted: I did not know very much about the practices of the indigenous peoples who inhabited that territory. That is why I decided to try to reconstruct indigenous itineraries by reading ethnohistorical textual sources against the grain. I was relatively happy with the results but, unfortunately, that line of work allowed me to account for only some of the territorial practices of the Charrua or Guenoa after the arrival of Europeans to the region.7 For this reason, I started to explore what another discipline (archaeology) could offer when it comes to shedding light on indigenous pasts. In this way, by learning about their pre-Columbian past, I tried to get a better understanding of indigenous territorial practices during the colonial encounter— in particular, although not exclusively, through the study of the construction and use of earthen structures known as “Cerritos de indios” from the years 5000 BP to the sixteenth century (Verdesio 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001b). In order to justify the inclusion of present-day indigenous peoples in the field of colonial studies, it might be useful to tell the story of how I realized that they are subjects before whom we, scholars of colonial Latin America, should not remain indifferent.This story has the Whitefish River tribe from Canada as the collective protagonist: they had been claiming, from the beginning of the 1980s, the human remains of several individuals and the associated funerary materials (obtained in a 1938 excavation) stored at the University of Michigan’s Museum of Natural History.The problem was that the museum’s interpretation of the current legislation (NAGPRA: Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) stated that the institution was not obliged to return remains to tribes not federally recognized by the government of the United States. Whether this is a correct interpretation or not, the problem with the museum’s position is that it did not take into account the historical, political, and ethical overtones of the claim.The faculty members of the Program in Native American Studies at the same university, did, though: we opposed the museum’s decision.The President of the University and her lawyers agreed with us and, in 2005, the University of Michigan returned the human remains and associated materials to the tribe.8 What impressed me the most was both the importance indigenous peoples of the present assigned to the remains of their ancestors and how crucial it was for their dignity as a people to recover them. This experience completely changed the way in which I view the meaning and reach of my role as an expert on indigenous studies.Yet, besides the ethical aspect intrinsic to this kind of conflict, I was also struck by the irruption of the materiality of indigenous peoples of the past in the present. It was this complex relation between different temporalities that made me think that one cannot study indigenous pasts without taking into account the consequences one’s work might have for the heirs of that past. Unfortunately, for a long time, some scholars have demanded respect for what they think is their right to investigate, stating that rationality and science are on their side, while accusing indigenous peoples who reclaimed the bodies of their ancestors of basing their actions on emotional and religious motivations.This is one of the consequences of the conflictive history of the relationship between, on the one hand, indigenous peoples, and, on the other, scholars and the state. Archaeologists and physical anthropologists have acted, from time immemorial, without ever feeling the need to consult with the descendants of the human groups who built the

275

Gustavo Verdesio

archaeological sites they study. Even today, especially in countries where there is a much less developed legal regulation of repatriation or restitution of human remains, many archaeologists refuse to do consultation with indigenous peoples related to the sites they are investigating. One of the reasons behind this situation is the scholars’ tendency to consider indigenous peoples as objects of study instead of viewing them as subjects with knowledge, agency, and rights. Unfortunately, there are still many archaeologists and physical anthropologists who do not understand that the legislation on the restitution of human remains belongs to the realm of human rights and, therefore, has precedence over the regular law—say, over heritage legislation (Verdesio 2011).9 My contact with the problematics that affect present-day indigenous peoples led me to develop an interest in another form of materiality that occasionally bothers both academics and regular citizens: the living bodies of indigenous peoples. From the moment of the “discovery” of the Americas, European empires, first, and nation-states, later, as well as practitioners of academic disciplines, have had serious difficulties in understanding, and relating to, indigenous peoples. In the present, regardless of whether they live in remote areas like Amazonia, in reservations, or in cities, they have posed all kinds of challenges to European societies. For starters, their ontological status is always uncertain and their contemporaneity or coevalness, as we have already seen, is often denied or put into question. Moreover, the physical presence of indigenous peoples poses all kinds of challenges to states like those in Latin America, that have been built upon the subjugation of the Natives. The situation is even worse in states like Uruguay, where the kind of colonialism developed on its lands was of a particular kind: settler colonialism. There is a growing bibliography on this kind of colonialism, which developed in places like Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, and, I argue, in Uruguay, and in parts of Argentina. It is a form of colonialism that is not based on the exploitation of vast numbers of indigenous peoples with the intention of obtaining the highest surplus value possible, but on the actual occupation and exploitation of the land by the settlers themselves (Veracini 2011). This is why the strategies used by settlers include the forced assimilation, displacement, and/or extermination10 of the indigenous population (Veracini 2011, 2–3). This logic responds to the main objective of the settlers: to have access to the territory (Wolfe 2006, 388, 393). The originary violence that founds the settler colonial state takes the form of a dispossession that needs to be confirmed and legitimized by the majority of its citizens on a daily basis. In some societies, they do so not only by denying the rights of indigenous peoples to their lands, but also by ignoring their mere existence.The reason behind this kind of strategy is that settlers, once they have already taken possession of the land, demand that the Native leave, disappear or assimilate and, for that very reason, the best form of resistance for indigenous peoples is to continue to exist (Veracini 2011).This is so because settler colonialism, unlike the most pervasive colonialism that developed in Latin America, does not aspire to persist or to be perceived as colonialism, but to disappear as such (Veracini 2011). In this type of colonial situation, then, the most effective strategy of resistance for indigenous peoples is, in the words of Patrick Wolfe, to simply stay at home (2006). This is precisely what happens in Uruguay, which proudly presents itself as “a country without Indians” that does not suffer from that Latin American endemic “illness”—what José Carlos Mariátegui called “el problema del Indio” (1978, 35, 40). However, in the last thirty years or so, a number of activists have claimed indigenous (more precisely, Charrua) identity. The activists are part of a process of ethnogenesis that some have called reemergence.11 One of their goals is that Uruguay ratifies Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization, the only international legislation that has binding force for ratifying nation-states. This ethnic reemergence, a

276

It comes with the territory

phenomenon unknown to Uruguay throughout its life as an independent nation, has taken a lot of people by surprise, because the work of the first generation of anthropologists (Daniel Vidart, Renzo Pi Ugarte) and their followers (Leonel Cabrera and Carmen Curbelo, just to mention a couple), has been unanimous in decreeing the extinction of indigenous life in the Uruguayan territory (Verdesio 2014). This continuity in the denial of indigenous presence of Charrua (or any other) Indians in Uruguay by scholars who study the past is not something one should take lightly: it has affected the activists’ chances to advance their human rights agenda. In a context where everybody thinks of themselves as a descendant of Europeans, the irruption of those bodies in the public sphere has been received with disapproval and, sometimes, verbal violence: all kinds of adjectives and insults have been aimed at the activists (Verdesio 2014).This rejection of the movement of ethnic reemergence by vast segments of the population should not surprise anyone, for they are the beneficiaries of the foundational orginary violence typical of settler colonialism, whose consequences are now enjoyed by the non-indigenous citizens of the Uruguayan nation-state. They probably suspect that the only thing that can lay bare the structure and the dynamics of the settler colonial system is the persistence and survival of indigenous peoples who identify themselves as such.The subversive power of that human materiality helps us understand the complex relationships between the present and indigenous pasts, between colonialism, coloniality, and settler colonialism, and, last but not least, between our work and some of the subaltern groups of the present. Other academic associations, like the American Anthropological Association (AAA), in their code of ethics have, in order to protect the human subjects with whom they work, guiding principles such as “do no harm.”12 It is our responsibility, too, to be aware of the consequences of our work for the struggles of indigenous peoples of the present as well as to be careful not to give new life to colonial prejudices and misrepresentations that could harm them.

Notes 1 Castañeda also wrote a book, entitled In the Museum of Maya Culture, on the reception and consumption of Maya ruins and their role in the creation of identities. 2 Another book that combines the use of colonial documents (the colonial visitas) and archaeological excavations is Negotiated Settlements by Steven A. Wernke, who undertakes an investigation of the successive uses, by different societies over time (through the pre-Inca, Inca, and colonial periods), of a site in the Colca Valley, in the highlands of southern Peru (2013). 3 See, for example, the work by Anthony Aveni (2000), Nicola Massini et al. (2016) (on the Nazca lines) and the research by Tom Zuidema (1964), and Brian Bauer (1992) (on the ceque system). 4 See for example, the groundbreaking work by Clark Erickson on the raised fields (a pre-Hispanic system abandoned before the arrival of the Spaniards) in Llanos de Moxos, Bolivia, (1992) and (1993). 5 Another kind of record-keeping device developed by indigenous peoples of the past: a material artifact that comprises threads and knots made of cotton or wool. The most important scholars in this field are Frank Salomon (2004) and Gary Urton (2003) and (2017). Marcia and Robert Ascher,William Conklin, and others, have contributed chapters to a book edited by Urton and Jeffrey Quilter, that offers a reasonable overview of khipu studies at the time of publication (2002). Maybe the only significant contributor missing in that volume is Galen Brokaw (2010), author of the book A History of the Khipu. 6 The most influential work on the relaciones geográficas was produced in the nineties by Walter Mignolo (1990) and (1995) and Barbara Mundy (1996). Also, see Kelly McDonough’s essay in this volume. 7 Recently, Jeffrey Erbig has succeeded in offering a very compelling picture of the itineraries of Charrua and Guenoa Indians in the Uruguayan territory in the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth (2016). 8 I was also involved, in 2007, in another case—this time in the Province of Santa Cruz, in the Argentinean Patagonia (Verdesio 2010b).

277

Gustavo Verdesio 9 Lacking more space to address this topic, the reader can consult, in order to get a clearer idea about the central issues of the discussion, the books by Devon Mihesuah (2000), C. Timothy McKeown (2013), and the volume edited by Cressida Fforde, Jane Hubert, and Paul Thurnbull (The Dead and Their Possessions). The only repatriation of human remains in Uruguayan history took place in 2002: the Charrua cacique Vaimaca Pirú was brought back to Uruguay from Paris, but the process, originally initiated by an association of descendants of the Charrua (ADENCH), was appropriated by the Uruguayan state (Verdesio 2010b). 10 See the work by Scott Lauria Morgensen for a biopolitical view of the logic of settler colonialism (2011). 11 For a discussion of the terminology to be used to discuss the cases of indigenous peoples who have been declared extinct by scholars and politicians, see the dossier compiled by Mariela Eva Rodríguez for Conversaciones del Cono Sur (2017). 12 See the American Anthropological Association blog (2019).

Works cited American Anthropological Association. 2019. http://s3.amazonaws.com/rdcms-aaa/files/production/ public/FileDownloads/pdfs/issues/policy-advocacy/upload/AAA-Ethics-Code-2009.pdf Arias, Santa. 2010. “Rethinking Space: An Outsider’s View of the Spatial Turn.” GeoJournal. 75 (1): 29–41. Aveni, Anthony F. 2000. Between the Lines. The Mystery of the Giant Ground Drawings of Ancient Nasca, Peru. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bauer, Brian. 1992. “Ritual Pathways of the Inca: An Analysis of the Collasuyu Ceques in Cuzco.” Latin American Antiquity 3 (3): 183–205. Bentancor, Orlando. 2017. The Matter of Empire. Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Blattner, William. 2008 (2006). Heidegger’s Being and Time: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum. Boone, Elizabeth Hill and Walter D. Mignolo. 1996 (1994). Writing without Words. Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Breglia, Lisa. 2006. Monumental Ambivalence:The Politics of Heritage. Austin: University of Texas Press. Brokaw, Galen. 2010. A History of the Khipu. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burger, Richard L. and Lucy C. Salazar, eds. 2004. Machu Picchu. Unveiling the Mystery of the Incas. New Haven:Yale University Press. Castañeda, Quetzil E. 1996. In the Museum of Maya Culture:Touring Chichen Itza. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Certeau, Michel de. 1988. The Writing of History.Translated by Tom Conley. New York: Columbia University Press. Coe, Michael D. 1999 (1992). Breaking the Maya Code, Revised Edition. New York: Thames and Hudson. Conkey, Margaret W. 1999. “An End Note. Reframing Materiality for Archaeology.” In Material Meanings: Critical Approaches or the Interpretation of Material Culture, edited by Elizabeth S. Chilton, 133–141. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Cummins, Thomas B.F. 2002. Toasts with the Inca: Andean Abstraction and Colonial Images on Quero Vessels. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Dean, Carolyn. 2010. A Culture of Stone. Inka Perspectives on Rock. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Del Valle, Ivonne. 2009. “On Shaky Ground: Hydraulics, State Formation, and Colonialism in SixteenthCentury Mexico.” Hispanic Review 77 (2): 197–220. Erbig, Jeffrey. 2016. “Borderline Offerings: Tolderías and Mapmakers in the Eighteenth-Century Río de la Plata.” Hispanic American Historical Review 96 (3): 445–480. Erickson, Clark. 1992. “Prehistoric Landscape Management in the Andean Highlands: Raised Field Agriculture and its Environmental Impact.” Population and Environment 13 (4): 285–300. ———. 1993. “The Social Organization of Prehispanic Raised Field Agriculture in the Lake Titicaca Basin.” In Economic Aspects of Water Management in the Prehispanic New World: Research in Economic Anthropology, Supplement 7, edited by Vernon Scarborough and Barry Isaac, 369–426. Greenwich, CT: Jai Press. Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press.

278

It comes with the territory Fforde, Cressida, Jane Hubert, and Paul Thurnbull. 2004. The Dead and their Possessions: Repatriation in Principle, Policy and Practice. London: Routledge. Flores Ochoa, Jorge A. 2004. “Contemporary Significance of Machu Picchu.” In Machu Picchu. Unveiling the Mistery of the Incas, edited by Richard L. Burger and Lucy C. Salazar, 109–123. New Haven: Yale University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1971. “The Thing.” In Poetry, Language,Thought by Martin Heidegger.Translated by Albert Hofstader, 163–182. New York: Harper and Row. ———. 2003. Ser y Tiempo. Translated by Jorge Eduardo Rivera C. Madrid: Trotta. Himpele, Jeffrey and Quetzil Castañeda, dir. 1997. Incidents of Travel in Chichen Itza. Watertown, MA: Documentary Educational Resources (DER). Inwood, Michael. 1997. Heidegger. A Very Short Introduction. London: Oxford University Press. Lentz, David. 2000. “Introduction: Definitions and Conceptual Underpinnings.” In Imperfect Balance. Landscape Transformations in the Precolumbian Americas, edited by David Lentz, 1–11. New York: Columbia University Press.. Malpass, Michael. 1993. Provincial Inca: Archaeological and Ethnohistorical Assessment of the Impact of the Inca State. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Mariátegui, José Carlos. 1978(1928). Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana. Mexico City: Serie Popular Era. Masini, Nicola, Giuseppe Orefici, Maria Danese, and Antonio Pecci. 2016.“Cahuachi and Pampa de Atarco: Towards Greater Comprehension of Nasca Geoglyphs.” In The Ancient Nasca World New Insights from Science and Archaeology, edited by Rosa Lasaponara, Nicola Masini, and Giuseppe Orefici, 239–278. Berlin: Springer International Publishing. McKeown, C. Timothy. 2013. In the Smaller Scope of Conscience: The Struggle for National Repatriation Legislation, 1986–1990. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Mignolo, Walter. 1990. “La grafía, la voz y el silencio: las relaciones geográficas de Indias en el contexto de las letras virreinales.” Insula 45 (522): 11–12. ———. 1995. The Darker Side of the Renassaince. Literacy,Territoriality and Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mihesuah, Devon A., ed. 2000. Repatriation Reader.Who Owns American Indian Remains? Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Morgensen, Scott Lauria. 2011. “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now” Settler Colonial Studies 1: 52–76 Moseley, Michael E. 2001 (1992). The Incas and Their Ancestors: The Archaeology of Peru. New York: Thames and Hudson. Mundy, Barbara E. 1996. The Mapping of New Spain. indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas, Revised Edition. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nemser, Daniel. 2017. Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ohio History Connection. 2018. https://www.ohiohistory.org/learn/collections/archaeology/archaeology-blog/january-2018/2018-octagon-open-house Peters, Charles. 2000. “Precolumbian Silviculture and indigenous Management of Neotropical Forests.” In Imperfect Balance. Landscape Transformations in the Precolumbian Americas, edited by David Lentz, 203–223. New York: Columbia University Press. Quilter, Jeffrey and Gary Urton. 2002. Narrative Threads. Accounting and Recounting in Andean Khipu. Austin: University of Texas Press. Raffles, Hugh and Antoinette M.G.A. Winkler Prins. 2003. “Further Reflections on Amazonian Environmental History: Transformations of Rivers and Streams.” Latin American Research Review 38 (3): 165–187. Rodríguez, Mariela Eva. 2017. “Reemergencia indígena en los países del Plata: Los casos de Uruguay y de Argentina.” Conversaciones del Cono Sur 3.1. https://conosurconversaciones.wordpress.com/volumen3-numero-1/ Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York:Vintage. Salomon, Frank. 2004. The Cord Keepers. Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stephen, Lynn. 1997. Review of In the Museum of Maya Culture:Touring Chichen Itza by Quetzil Castañeda. Contemporary Sociology 26 (6): 781–782. Silverberg, Robert. 1986 (1970). The Mound Builders. Athens: Ohio University Press.

279

Gustavo Verdesio Urton, Gary. 2003. Signs of the Inca Khipu. Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String. Records. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2017. Inca History in Knots. Reading Khipus as Primary Sources. Austin: University of Texas Press. Veracini, Lorenzo. 2011. “Introducing Settler Colonial Studies.” Settler Colonial Studies 1: 1–12. Verdesio, Gustavo. 1997. “Las representaciones territoriales del Uruguay colonial: hacia una hermenéutica pluritópica.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 23 (46):135–161. ———. 1999. “Hacia la descolonización de la mirada geográfica: las prácticas territoriales indígenas en la ‘prehistoria’ de la ribera norte del Río de la Plata” Revista Iberoamericana 186: 59–80. ———. 2000. “En busca de las tradiciones ignoradas por la “tiranía de las tres culturas”: hacia el estudio de las concepciones y prácticas territoriales de los indígenas prehistóricos.” Trabajos de arqueología del paisaje 19: 35–45. ———. 2001a. “Todo lo que es sólido se disuelve en la academia: sobre los estudios coloniales, la teoría poscolonial, los estudios subalternos y la cultura material.” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 35: 633–660. ———. 2001b. “Forgotten Territorialities: The Materiality of indigenous Pasts.” Nepantla. Views from South 2 (1): 85–114. ———. 2010a. “Invisible at a Glance: indigenous Cultures of the Past, Ruins, Archaeological Sites, and Our Regimes of Visibility.” In Ruins of Modernity, edited by Julia Hell and Andreas Schonle, 339–353. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2010b. “El drama de la restitución de restos humanos y sus actores en Uruguay y Argentina: El Estado, los/las arqueólogos/as y las comunidades de Pueblos Originarios.” In El regreso de los muertos y las promesas de oro: Usos y significados de la cultura indígena, edited by Carina Jofre, 123–139. Catamarca, AR: Universidad de Catamarca. ———. 2011. “Entre las visiones patrimonialistas y los derechos humanos: Reflexiones sobre restitución y repatriación en Argentina y Uruguay.” Corpus Archivos Virtuales de la Alteridad Americana 1 (1): 1–6. ———. 2014.“Un fantasma recorre el Uruguay: La reemergencia charrúa en un ‘país sin indios’” Cuadernos de Literatura 18 (36): 86–107. Vilches, Elvira. 2010. New World Gold. Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wernke, Steven A. 2013. Negotiated Settlements. Andean Communities and Landscapes under Inka and Spanish Colonialism. Gainsville: University Press of Florida. Wolfe, Patrick. (2006). “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409. Yoffee, Norman. 2005. Myths of the Archaic State: Evolution of the Earliest Cities, States, and Civilizations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zuidema, R.T. 1964. The Ceque System of Cuzco. The Social Organization of the Capital of the Inca. Leiden: E. J. Brill.

280

16 CREOLE KNOWLEDGE IN COLONIAL MEXICO Religion, gender and power Stephanie Kirk

Religion—both the institutional and liturgical practices of the Church as well as the cultural impact in society of the ideology and behaviors it initiated—lay at the heart of the Spanish imperial endeavor, the concurrent evangelization project, and the development of new American mentalities. Enrique Dussel explains that, for the Spanish Crown and its agents, there existed a “fundamental ambiguity” between the projects of colonization and evangelizing (1981, 38). Broadening this perspective, Nelson Maldonado Torres (2017), drawing on the theories of Sylvia Wynter, explains how “religious discourses contributed not only to the expansion of the existing empires, but also to the legitimization of ideas such as race” (549). He details how the European “discovery” of the Americas challenged “theocentric models of creation and salvation” creating a more secular point of view (what he calls “religious-secular”) allowing for European empires such as Spain to take on the belief of a “non-homogenous” humanity in which they occupied a position of privilege wherein God had “truly made the world for them to enjoy and exploit its resources” (550). According to Maldonado Torres, this way of thinking engendered a “racist and religious-secular humanism” that lay at the heart of Western modernity predating and eventually inventing “formal categories of race” (550). Religious and epistemological domination also brought into being new gendered ideologies that wielded great influence in the formation of institutions and practices related to Christianity. Dussel (1981) underscores the imposition of a clearly demarcated racial and gender hierarchy in which the conquistador emerged as “man of respectability” whilst “the most alienated of all” was the Indian woman (5). In seventeenth-century New Spain, knowledge had become one of the central currencies of colonial power because of its connection to elite masculinity and the institution of the Church. Religion, erudition, and masculinity came together in colonial Mexico to construct a variant of what Raewyn Connell has dubbed “hegemonic masculinity” (2005, 72). Connell also pluralizes masculinity, making us aware that it is not indeed monolithic but instead exists in a series of subordinate and dominant positions. Elite clergy and members of the religious orders occupied powerful positions in intellectual, cultural, and political life, wielding power not only over women but also over huge numbers of marginalized and subordinate men.These Creole authors formed a tightly-constructed network of similarly educated men who stood united in a common purpose of advancing their American patria while simultaneously remaining loyal to the 281

Stephanie Kirk

Spanish imperial project.1 Higher education in New Spain became synonymous with an ecclesiastical career with churchmen controlling almost all educational institutions along with the printing and circulation of literature and other materials, thus becoming, as Dussel explains, “the primary organism responsible for and committed to the perpetuation of the Hispanic world view” (1981, 43). The Jesuits, in particular, placed erudition at the heart of their New Spanish enterprise and in the colleges they built in urban areas they educated the sons of influential colonial Creoles as a way of securing benefactors for their wider mission of saving souls, countering metropolitan prejudices about New World degeneracy and as a means of consolidating genealogical power through the shaping of generations of young men in their own image (Kirk 2016, 63–65). Although some educational opportunities existed for indigenous men, they were not plentiful and Afro-Hispanics and other castas found themselves excluded from educational institutions as did women. In this way, knowledge production in New Spain became highlygendered and racialized as well as exclusively connected to the imposition of Christianity. The role of knowledge in the success of the colonization and evangelization project cannot be underestimated. Aníbal Quijano describes this relationship thus: “Europe’s hegemony over the new model of global power concentrated all forms of the control of subjectivity, culture, and especially knowledge and the production of knowledge under its hegemony” (2000, 540).Walter Mignolo (1995) has called this mechanism of domination the “hegemony of the letter” and demonstrates how the Spaniards used books and writing to subordinate and erase indigenous knowledge and impose their own epistemological systems in the service of religious and political authority. Formed in the crucible of New World Catholic realities these new ideological socio-cultural formulations found themselves crystallized in the literary and cultural production of colonial Creoles who forged their own intellectual and political traditions and attempted to negotiate the foundations of what Anna More terms “local patrimonial orders” (2013, 44). In the latter part of the sixteenth century and in the seventeenth, the formation of Creole knowledge must be characterized as unstable since it couldn’t free itself from Western epistemology nor imperial allegiances but, at the same time, colonial Creoles attempted to position themselves as both generator and communicator of dominant American knowledge. In their writings, Kathleen Ross describes a constant “wavering of language from dominant to subordinate positions” resulting in “subversions of European models even when those models are consciously being imitated” (1993, 7). Colonial Creoles would strategically engage and manipulate indigenous knowledges to promote their own local, dominant knowledge over the metropole since, as Linda Alcoff explains,“Amerindian peoples were not considered to be in a position to present their own epistemic credentials, much less to judge European ones” (2008, 81). I am using dominant knowledge in the way that Foucault (1997) developed it to indicate the relationship between knowledge and power and to elucidate how dominant knowledge existed in tension with other forms of knowledge against which it defined itself. Creole knowledge differentiated itself from subjugated knowledges reveling in the superior power dynamic they wielded over those whose stronger claim to autochthony they discounted. The presence of these subjugated knowledges demonstrates the limitations of the Foucauldian model for the colonial Mexican context given what Alcoff has dubbed Foucault’s “colonial unconscious” (2008, 80). As she explains, Foucault “characterized the formation of disciplinary power-knowledge regimes as originating within Europe, and presented the development of the modern episteme in such a way that divorced it from its colonial context” (80).Walter Mignolo’s theorizing of decoloniality takes some of Foucault’s work on knowledge and power as a starting point for his work on decoloniality but he radically departs from Foucault with his focus on the extreme impact of the “epistemic effects of colonialism.” (Alcoff 2008, 80). For Mignolo, coloniality must be foregrounded to understand how knowledge functions as its chief weapon as well as to grasp the systemic effects it engenders: 282

Creole knowledge in colonial Mexico

“‘Science’ (knowledge and wisdom) cannot be detached from language; languages are not just ‘cultural’ phenomena in which people find their ‘identity’; they are also the location where knowledge is inscribed. And, since languages are not something human beings have but rather something of what humans beings are, coloniality of power and of knowledge engendered the coloniality of being.” (qtd. in Maldonado-Torres 2007, 242) Given the precariousness of Creoles’ access to power through knowledge how do we conceive of their place within the colonial system? Following Jorge Klor de Alva, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel explains that the “Creole social sector could not be thought of as a foreign oppressive force within the American context” (2008, 16). At the same time, their whiteness protected them from the dehumanization of colonialism, what María Lugones terms the “process of active reduction of people, the dehumanization that fits them for the classification, the process of subjectification, the attempt to turn the colonized into less than human beings” (2010, 745). In their quest to cement power in society through the production and dissemination of knowledge, Creole authors found themselves thus complicit to a certain extent with society’s repressive colonial structures. Authors such as Bernardo de Balbuena, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora enjoyed the patronage of the viceroys and other members of the colonial administration. At the same time, all authors demonstrate, to varying degrees, the ambiguity that Creole subjects embodied as they picked their way through the colonial minefield that awarded their literary voice less power than that of their peninsular counterparts. The colonial Creole did not make common cause with those to whom the colonial matrix of power, in Aníbal Quijano’s famous formulation, directed its most rigid forms of oppression. The texts I have selected to analyze in this chapter reveal how knowledge and religion operate as twin poles of preoccupation and as mechanisms for the consolidation of power within the Creole literary and cultural landscape. The questions of race, ethnicity and gender function as lenses through which we can view the discursive contours of religion and knowledge and their relationship to the coloniality of power in Creole texts.

Scholarship trends on Creole religion, knowledge and gender The study of religion in Colonial Latin America is as broad as the practices it analyzes. Scholarship on Creole religion, with which I concern myself here, has investigated local American practices as well as the Church’s role as the official liturgical promoter of Tridentine values in the New World. An important subfield of the study of colonial region focuses on how Creole women accessed religious agency in convents, often through writing. Foundational studies include Word from New Spain, (1993) by Kathleen Myers (a translation and scholarly edition of the spiritual autobiography of the poblana nun, Madre María de San José), the decades-long work of Asunción Lavrin on the lives and writings of Mexican nuns which culminated in Brides of Christ (2008) and Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela’s Colonial Angels (2000). The latter, perhaps more than any other study, examines the specific transformations Creole women brought to bear on the convent space. In addition, my own Convent Life in Colonial Mexico (Kirk 2007) explores how Creole nuns constructed and lived in communities despite the Church’s attempt to impose control. In counterpoint to these studies of Creole nuns, we find Mónica Díaz’s, Indigenous Writings from the Convent (2010), a groundbreaking study of the first convent for indigenous women in Mexico, Corpus Christi, founded in 1724. Alongside specialist studies on convents, we also find important anthologies that address a wide spectrum of religious cultures and devotions including Stafford Poole and Susan Schroeder’s Religion in New Spain (2015), which offers insight on the all-encompassing nature of colonial religious culture and Martin Nesvig’s Local Religion in 283

Stephanie Kirk

Colonial Mexico (2006) which presents essays tracing the development of local religious practices across a broad swathe of New Spanish Christian communities. Creole knowledge and Creole intellectuals have also been a topic of interest for scholars of New Spain. The work of Anna More and Kathleen Ross on the polymathic baroque intellectual, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora has traced the intricacies of how the baroque complexities helped crystallize a Creole consciousness around questions of sovereignty (More) and history (Ross). In 2013’s Baroque Sovereignty More traces the scholarly and ideological underpinnings of Sigüenza y Góngora’s construction of a “Creole archive” that reflected his selffashioned American authority within the imperial hierarchy and that posited the Creole as being “on top of the racial hierarchy” thanks to what she terms “their own virtue, purity of blood, and local knowledge” (2013, 7). Ross situates Sigüenza y Góngora as the Creole historian par excellence who struggles with what she terms the “need to define New World history from an American perspective” (1993, 41). Sigüenza accessed his Creole subjectivity through the writing of history that “lay outside standard boundaries and genres” (77). My own most recent work, most pertinently my monograph Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge (2016), builds on these two strands of religion and Creole intellectualism together through a study of the seventeenth-century New Spain scholarly milieu in which the nun and poet, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, inserted herself by dint of her spectacular erudition and despite the opposition she faced because of her gender. Sor Juana’s self-representation as a female American intellectual both mirrored and confronted that of the male Creole intellectual whose identity became bound up in questions of power as we shall see in the texts I will discuss in what follows.

Balbuena: knowledge production and religion in Grandeza mexicana Born in Valdepeñas, Spain in 1526, the cleric and poet Bernardo de Balbuena (d. 1627) came to Mexico as a young man in 1584. Although he spent only a few years in Mexico City, the content of his most famous work—the epistolary poem Grandeza mexicana (1604)—revolves around the splendors of Mexico City. Balbuena (2006) divides his poem into nine thematically arranged chapters in whose discourse, the poet tells us in the opening “Argumento,” we will find all “cifrado” (encoded) (59). Doña Isabel Tobar, a wealthy widow and friend of the poet, plans to come to the capital to profess as a nun and asks him to describe the city to her. Balbuena frames his portrait of the city in gendered terms as he offers Isabel a “perfectísimo retrato” (most perfect portrait) of the urban center, laying out his vision of the city for a woman who will in all likelihood never experience it since she will spend her life in permanent enclosure (63). He offers a public, masculine vision of the city that presents information on a variety of topics that display the city’s global commercial might. In Balbuena’s telling, Mexico becomes the center of world commerce replacing Spain as the axis of economic connection and serving as an intermediary between East and West (Fuchs and Martínez-San Miguel 2009, 682). This commercial dominance accrues economic benefit and allows Mexico, Balbuena implies, to underwrite the costs of a sophisticated religious and intellectual New World center. The conquest—the origin story of this version of the city—presenting instead a vision that centers on the institutionalization of the colony and the concomitant occidentalizing urbanization (69).2 The vanquished indigenous subject, moreover, is almost absent from the poem and instead finds representation solely through its lowly but crucial contribution to the city’s commercial enterprise with Balbuena’s infamous description of the “indio feo” (ugly Indian). This denigrated symbol makes his sole appearance in the penultimate stanza of the poem where we see him filling the Spanish fleet with tribute (2006, 124).The conquest, moreover, has reached a definitive end. A true Pax Hispánica reigns in 284

Creole knowledge in colonial Mexico

Mexico: “Solo el furioso dios de las batallas/aquí no influye” (Only the ferocious god of war wields no influence here) (81). Balbuena promotes an urban universe which Barbara Fuchs and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel describe as “concebida simultáneamente como fuente de riqueza y como sostén del proyecto imperial hispánico (epílogo y capítulo último)” (simultaneously conceived of as a source of wealth and as shoring up the Hispanic imperial project (epilogue and final chapter)) (2006, 676).The closely intertwined areas of knowledge production and religion serve as two of the most important foundations of this imperial project. The poet dedicates one of Grandeza mexicana’s nine chapters to a description of “Religión y estado” (Religion and the State) in the great metropolis but the stanzas do not narrate the evangelization of the indigenous peoples but instead center on the foundation of the New Spanish religious orders. Balbuena, according to Monika Kaup, “glosses over” the connection between religion and materialism (2017, 268) but, I would say, he instead forges a link between them. In Chapter XIX and throughout the poem he evokes the glorious material manifestation of religion in the form of the architecture that will distinguish the new city.The association of the city with transplanted western knowledge began with the first stanza when the poet presents the urban space as a tabula rasa awaiting the cultural imprint of the Spaniards: “Bañado de un templado y fresco viento/donde nadie creyó que hubiese mundo” (63). (Bathed by a temperate and refreshing breeze/where no one believed a world existed). The male religious orders will become the producers and disseminators of this dominant knowledge and Balbuena dedicates a stanza to each of the orders who had established themselves in New Spain at the time of the poem’s writing and under whose rules only whites could profess. He describes, for example, the Jesuits: “la compañía y santo relicario/del nombre de Jesús; su gran concierto/de profeso, colegio y seminario” (the society and holy reliquary bearing Jesus’s name; their great assembly of professed house, college and seminary) (2006, 108). As Balbuena does here with the Jesuits, the descriptions of all the male orders highlight their contribution to the capital’s erudition. Although he offers lyric praise to the various female orders, he does so within a gendered framework. He emphasizes their virtue and, in many cases, their adherence to the vow of cloister, unique to the female communities and assuming an unprecedented symbolism in the perceived hostile New World environment.3 Of the rule of St. Monica he writes “De la gloriosa Mónica la grata/clausura y voluntario encerramiento” (of glorious Monica/joyful cloister and willing enclosure) (2006, 109). Balbuena’s gendering of knowledge production in his depiction of the religious orders will be repeated in the spiritual biographies and other writings these same religious orders themselves generate as, in the seventeenth century, Creole religious texts come to dominate the printing press. Thanks to their burgeoning demographic base, Creole identity and culture begin to crystallize in this period. The Mexican printing press, subject to a wide variety of imperial constraints on the publishing of fiction, directed much of its output to religious publications that told of the exemplary lives of hermits, visionaries, mystics, ascetic nuns and learned priests and fomented the special characteristics of baroque Creole piety.

Andrés Pérez de Ribas and Juan Antonio de Oviedo: Creole Jesuit masculinity and spiritual exemplarity Literature that told of male religious exemplarity exposed the New Spanish reader to a masculine world of religious action, exteriority and power through the experiences of men of the religious orders as well as their secular Church counterparts who fulfilled their apostolic mission as teachers, scholars and missionaries. One of the greatest responsibilities a male religious could assume was that of the missionary who would bring the word of God to those living in the 285

Stephanie Kirk

ignominious darkness of idolatry. Of singular importance in this regard is Historia de los Triunfos de Nuestra Santa Fe entre gentes las más bárbaras … conseguidos por los soldados de la milicia de Ia Compañía de Jesús en las misiones de la Provincia de Nueva-España (1645) the Spanish Jesuit, Andrés Pérez de Ribas’s compendious history of the missionary efforts of the Society on the Northern frontier. The 13-volume work describes the foundation of the Jesuit missions in Sinaloa and Sonora, and the Jesuits’ evangelization work among the indigenous peoples there between the years of 1590 and 1644. Pérez de Ribas provides biographies of the Jesuits martyred there, offering testimony to their religious exemplarity and masculine courage. One of these men is the Jesuit protomartyr of New Spain, Gonzalo de Tapia (1561–1594), who was killed in Tavoropa, Sinaloa in 1594 by the cacique Nacabeba and to whom Pérez de Ribas dedicates part of Book II. In Pérez de Ribas’s text, religion, empire and masculinity become predicated on the religious knowledge the martyr’s body generates.The Jesuit martyr embodied manly sacrifice and imitatio christi made in the name of the Jesuit mission of saving souls. Lavrin explains that New World accounts of martyrdom did evoke those of the early Church but, at the same time the world they encountered bore little resemblance to the ancient world they had read about and therein they met “people who were unlike any other” and who were to become “one of the most difficult adversaries Christianity had ever met” (2014, 132). Therefore, it became supremely significant for Pérez de Ribas to present the martyr’s death in the most glorious of terms, evoking comparisons with the martyrs of the early Church, but at the same time recreating in the text a specifically local and New Spanish theatre of martyrdom. As Maureen Ahern explains, through Pérez de Ribas’s text the Jesuits created an “evangelizing epic” featuring their own “frontier martyrs” (1999, 15). The male body in pain becomes the bearer of hegemonic masculinity and Christian evangelical knowledge as death infuses it with the ultimate power. In the case of Tapia, the conversion of the indigenous peoples to whom he had ministered for many years finally comes to pass owing to the events set in motion by his suffering and ultimate death: Más glorioso fue el triunfo que consiguió con su muerte el bendito Padre Tapia (…) pues lo que en la vida no pudo alcanzar de él, en un año entero de amonestaciones que le costaron su vida, exhortándole con amor de Padre, a que reconociese sus pecados y sus vicios, y no fuese tropiezo de las almas; todo eso lo alcanzó en el cielo en para la hora de la muerte de Nacabeba.4 (1944, 242)

(More glorious was the triumph that blessed Father Tapia achieved with his death (…) since what in life he could not achieve after a year of the warnings that cost him his life, exhorting, with a Father’s love, that he should acknowledge his sins and vices, and not be an obstacle to these souls; all this he attained in heaven an hour after the death of Nacabeba.) Other Jesuit biographies present erudition as the path to divine favor rather than the spectacular suffering of the martyr. The martyr’s masculine forbearance, however, figures in the representation of these other exemplary religious men and so even in biographies of clerics who spent much of their lives as teachers and scholars we hear tell of the physical stress of difficult journeys or of men who exhausted themselves through untold hours of study.The biography of Antonio Núñez de Miranda (1702), erstwhile confessor of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and authored by his fellow Jesuit, Juan Antonio de Oviedo, depicts the great knowledge that Núñez—the “biblioteca viva de la Compañia” (the Society’s living library)—accumulated during arduous years of Jesuit education and that he communicated to New Spanish society through 286

Creole knowledge in colonial Mexico

his writings, his work as confessor, and as professor at Jesuit colleges in Mexico and Guatemala. Oviedo (1702) recounts Núñez’s own Jesuit education in detail and then, in a distinctive Jesuit genealogical maneuver, recounts how he subsequently trained others both for admission to the Society or for secular service to Creole society attempting to mitigate through this spectacular erudition Spanish metropolitan disregard or even contempt for Creole intellectual ability. Oviedo represents this intellectual activity in terms of a quest for masculine hegemony, narrating a scene where Núñez is called upon to debate a group of learned Dominicans. Thanks to his rigorous Jesuit preparation in erudite disquisition he triumphs over all, leading to one of the Dominicans to declare him victorious, proclaiming: “Padres míos, ya es menester más que ordinarios estudios, porque es mucho hombre al que ha venido” (1702, 23) (Fathers, we have need of more than ordinary studies as a great man is among us).

Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora: religious hierarchies of race and gender The foundation of multiple New Spanish convents, predominantly in the seventeenth century, produced the female subjects whose exploits would fill hagiographies along with the male confessors who would guide them and write their stories.The limitations enclosure exacted on the nuns and the restrictions on their education and intellectual activity all promoted an embodied female piety and holy ignorance that offered a glaring contrast to the apostolic athleticism and intellectual prowess of religious men described in the biographies above.The contours of this female religiosity, once manifested in textual form, proved attractive to a reading public whose interest was piqued by the protagonists who were frequently cloistered women engaged in extreme mortification and enjoying vividly narrated visions. The Mexican convents, whose early foundations coincided with the galvanization of the Counter-Reformation, inherited the prohibitive gender ideologies developed in the Western Christian tradition in which women threatened moral rectitude owing to their uncontrollable sexual impulses. New World cultural specificities in which alternative configurations of race and ethnicity threatened to undermine white racial purity shaped these ideologies. The endowing of exemplary women with intellectual alterity serves as a key maneuver in the ecclesiastical establishment’s strategic co-optation of female religiosity. Paraíso occidental, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s 1684 history of the foundations of the convent of Jesús María is a deeply complex and multifaceted text. Contained within its pages are a series of vidas, or spiritual biographies, of some of the women who inhabited the convent. The first of the text’s three books details the founding of Jesús María, the second tells of the prodigious religious life of the nun, Marina de la Cruz, and the third book introduces the exemplary nun, Juana de la Cruz, who left Jesús María to establish the discalced Carmelite convent of San José. Appended to this third book are concise biographies of nuns and other personages connected to the convent. Marina’s story, as told by her confessor, Pedro de la Mota, and rewritten by Sigüenza, offers a perfect example of female holy ignorance as promoted by the masculine ecclesiastical hierarchy. Marina enters the convent as a wealthy widow and Sigüenza details the humiliations she undergoes in proving her renunciation of the world and accepting the lowly status of novice. After a difficult beginning during which God punishes her for the sins of vanity and profane affections by grotesquely killing off her daughter, Marina enthusiastically embraces bodily abjection in the pursuit of exemplarity. Sigüenza recounts the repugnant results of Marina’s corporeal privations as well as the visions with which God rewards her. On one such occasion, Marina becomes possessed of the ability to write verses but deems herself unworthy of such a gift: “Qué es aquesto? ¿Quién a mí me ha hecho poeta? ¿Quién es que me ilustra mi entendimiento rudo y le sugiere semejantes palabras a mi torpe lengua?” (What is this? Who has 287

Stephanie Kirk

made me a poet? Who has enlightened my lowly understanding and brought such words to my clumsy tongue?) (1995, 169). Marina deems an emotional and embodied connection to the divine more suitable than a rational one. The many constraints on a nun’s life and, indeed, writings, make it unsurprising that so many women “bypassed rationality to enter into mystical communication with God” (Franco 1989, 4). Convents functioned as one of two ways that the Church could control white women’s sexuality, the other of course being through marriage. This control “would ensure the preservation of a criollo group that would continue to dominate the Indian, African, and increasingly mixed-race masses” (Ross 1993, 11). Convents like Jesús María became “bastions of racial selection” (Lavrin 2008, 20) where despite early clerical attempts, women of color were only admitted as servants. It was not until 1724 and the foundation of a convent for indigenous noblewomen when native females lived in the convent as nuns.5 At the end of Paraíso occidental, almost as an afterthought, Sigüenza includes three short narratives of two indigenous servants and one black female slave who worked in Jesús María. Like the white nuns who precede them in the book, Sigüenza intends for the retelling of these women’s lives to inspire others to exemplarity. This represents no inclusive gesture on his part, however. These women serve as spiritual paradigms despite their identity as women of color.6 In the case of Petronila de la Concepción, an indigenous woman who lived as a donada in the convent, he inserts his brief telling of her life into an exemplary frame, stressing, however, that she learned this behavior from the white nun whom she served and who, potentially, she continues to serve in Heaven: Ser santo el que con santos comunicare es aforismo del mismo Dios, y aquí nos ha de dar una pobrecita India comprobación ilustre, asistióle a la M. María de la Concepción como su criada cuando vivía, y así tengo por justo el que también aquí la acompañe, pues a lo que debemos creer se gozan ahora juntas en las delicias del cielo. (1995, 282–83)

(Saintly is she who lives with Saints is one of God’s aphorisms, and here we find the shining example of a poor little Indian woman. She worked as a servant of Mother María de la Concepción during the latter’s lifetime, and I know that she also accompanies her in death, since I have been given to believe that together they are enjoying Heaven’s delights.) Francisca de San Miguel, India, and María de San Juan, negra, share a chapter and Sigüenza boasts of his textual economies claiming “para que sea una sola la digresión, me parece muy conveniente el ponerlas juntas” (1995, 286) (so there might be just a single digression, it seems to me most convenient to put them together). None of the three women question their lowly place in the convent hierarchy and Sigüenza presents constant reminders of their humble origins, portraying them as “humilde,” (humble) “pequeña,” (small) or “pobrecita” (poor little woman). Regardless, God chose to bestow His favor upon them and Sigüenza explains how, nonetheless, each woman remained meek. In the case of María, the black slave, God enabled her to confront the devil when he appeared while the nuns were at choir. She rose fearlessly from the floor where she was crouched in her usual position and bade him be gone, which he did: “y avergonzado aquel espíritu de soberbia de que así lo tratase una pobrecita” (that arrogant spirit felt ashamed to be treated in this way by such a lowly creature) (1995, 290).7

288

Creole knowledge in colonial Mexico

Sigüenza represents the two indigenous women, Petronila and Francisca, as the lowliest of Christians but offers no explanation for why this should be, overlooking their idolatrous ancestry. Their humble status remains unquestioned and, seemingly, obvious to all. The equivalence between non-whiteness and subservience at the very end of Paraíso occidental contrasts with its beginning where, in a very American framing of the New Spanish convents, Sigüenza describes the Cihuatlamacazque, the Aztec priestesses who guarded the temple of Huitzilopochtli in pre-conquest Mexico. He likens them to Roman vestal virgins, thus endowing them with the patina of civilization comparisons to the classical world engendered. While, of course, the author depicts their religious practices as barbarous and idolatrous, he treats the aristocratic and virtuous Cihuatlamacazque with a respect bordering on reverence and presents them as the American exemplars and ancestors of the Creole nuns of Jesús María:“Y si hasta ahora al repetido ejemplo de lasVestales Romanas le conmovían los ánimos piadosos de las Cristianas Doncellas, no sé yo porque no ha de ser más eficaz, y activo el que aquí he propuesto” (And if up until now the frequent example of theVestalsVirgins of Rome would move the pious souls of Christian maidens, I see no reason why what I propose here should be any less effective and useful) (1995, 56).8 But he makes no connection between these indigenous women and the humble servants he describes at the end of the book who are indeed the Cihuatlamacazque’s true ancestors. We see this gesture repeated in a pair of Sigüenza’s other texts. In Teatro de virtudes políticas que constituyen a un príncipe (1680), Sigüenza also invokes the pre-Christian past to distinguish the Creole present. But in Alboroto y motín de los indios de México (1692), he divorces the native past from its colonial present in order to make it available for Creole appropriation. As Carlos Jáuregui explains in reference to the scornful way Sigüenza describes the natives who revolt against the viceroy in 1692 in Alboroto y motín: “como sabemos—y Sigüenza mismo lo deja en claro—entre los indios alegóricos y los alzados en armas y listos a quemar su sagrada biblioteca hay mucho trecho” (as we know—and as Sigüenza himself made it clear—there’s a huge gulf between the allegorical Indians and those up in arms and ready to burn down his precious library) (2003, 211). In 1680, Sigüenza secured a commission from the Cabildo of Mexico City to write a text to accompany a triumphal arch as part of a series of festivities to welcome the new viceroy the Marqués de la Laguna, the aforementioned Teatro de virtudes políticas. Sor Juana received the same charge from the Cathedral to design the other arch and explain the motifs in writing which she did in the Neptuno alegórico. She followed the conventional route of employing allegorical Greco-Latin figures to praise her noble subject, explaining one of the great similarities between the viceroy and the ancient god: Cupo a Neptuno en suerte el mar (como ya queda dicho), con todas las islas y estrechos. ¿Qué otra cosa fue esto, que ser Su Excelencia Marqués de la Laguna, General del Mar Océano, con todos los ejércitos y costas de Andalucía? (2007, 369) (Neptune brought good fortune to the sea along with all the straits and islands. Who other could this be than his Excellency, Marquis of la Laguna, General of the Ocean, with all the armies and coastal areas of Andalucía?) Pablo García calls Sor Juana’s homage to the incoming viceroy “brillante pero convencional” (brilliant but conventional) (2009, 220). Sigüenza y Góngora, on the other hand, aflame with “amor por la patria” (love for the fatherland) rejected European allegories and instead promoted the tlatoque or indigenous rulers as the model the Viceroy should embrace and Anna More emphasizes the “novelty” this gesture represents (2013, 113). Not content with offering an

289

Stephanie Kirk

innovative angle on the traditional imagery used in these contexts, Sigüenza also critiques those who adhere to the old models: Estilo común ha sido de los americanos ingenios hermosear con mitologías ideas de mentirosas fábulas las más de las portadas triunfales que se han erigido para recibir a los príncipes. No ignoro el motivo, y bien pudiera hacer juicio de sus aciertos. Si ha sido porque de entre las sombras de las fábulas eruditas se divisan las luces de las verdades heroicas. (5–6) (It has been a common custom of the most brilliant American minds to embellish the triumphal arches erected to welcome Princes with the mythological ideas of fallacious fables. I am not unaware of the reason and could easily pass judgment on their findings. Perhaps it has been that among the shadows of these learned fables they glimpse the light of heroic truths.) While Sigüenza operated under the illusion that his Creole erudition in some way advanced an indigenous perspective, at the same time the format and scope of Teatro de virtudes echoed the education of Christian princes of the European Renaissance tradition and flattened any possibility for an indigenous genealogy to present itself on its own terms (Adorno 2011, 35). As critics have noted, Sigüenza traffics in a remote and monumentalized indigenous past disconnected from the reality of its colonized descendants. The natives themselves disappear, replaced by a Creole history that appropriates an indigenous past in the service of self-aggrandizement at the expense of the metropolitan imperial power base (García 2009, 231). Sigüenza almost completely excises any references to indigenous religious practices, knowledge or beliefs. While he refers to “barbaridades” (barbarities) and employs other similar words to vaguely evoke their practices, he attempts instead to show their suitability for Christianity rather than detailing their own beliefs, explaining: “erraron los gentiles en el objeto no en el culto” (the gentiles mistook the object of worship not the worship itself) (62). In the lyric sections dedicated to each tlatoque, the author makes scant references to the sacred in the praise he directs at each, only occasionally invoking their “piedad” (Tizoctzin) or, in the context of a victory in battle, obscurely invoking their prayers (Motecohçuma Ilhuicaminan) which, like “sagradas ardientes flechas,” (flaming sacred arrows) go directly to heaven (64).9 Not only does he choose to desacralize the Aztec monarchy, he also places Huitzilopochtli, patron god of the Mexica, god of war and “the god whose appetite for sacrificial victims” provided the impetus for the flowery wars, among the genealogy of Mexican sovereigns he references (Harris 2010, 85). While the Aztecs ascribed human origins to Huitzilopochtli, Sigüenza’s incorporation of him into the pantheon of tlatoque is curious, especially since he desired to avoid referencing Aztec religion and ritual. Instead, the god who Durán and Mendieta had portrayed as “la imagen misma de un demonio” (Jáuregui 2003, 210) (the very image of a demon) becomes instead a rather anodyne and pious sovereign whose “acciones de fe constante” (actions of perpetual faith) mark his leadership style and who maintains God at the forefront of all he does (39).Thus, Sigüenza decontextualizes and transforms this most bloodthirsty of deities into a representation of good government and the Aztec past can, as in Paraíso occidental, serve the Creole present and secure its future. For Sigüenza, the sacred practices of the Aztec religious/knowledge system have no place in Teatro de virtudes and he nullifies the role of the tlatoque in the propagation of the divine. 290

Creole knowledge in colonial Mexico

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz: gendering Creole knowledge A close contemporary of Sigüenza y Góngora, the work of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz permits us to study the complexities of Creole knowledge and religion through the lens of the coloniality of gender. Her existence as a female Creole intellectual functions as a rebuke to coloniality’s gendered logic. She embodies the characteristics Lugones deems as constitutive of resistant subjectivity: “Legitimacy, authority, voice, sense, and visibility” (2010, 74). Knowledge allowed her to participate in the production of epistemes characteristically advanced by men. This is not to say she slavishly reproduced male ideas and obediently adhered to their precepts. A woman of genius and education who possessed her own ideas, she entered fearlessly into debate with male intellectuals.The resistance the Church offered to her work demonstrates the masculine anxiety that pervaded its institutional sites of learning. But how do we position the knowledge produced by Sor Juana within the colonial power structure? Did her works support or challenge coloniality? In the recent much-discussed Mexican telenovelized version of Sor Juana’s life, Juana Inés, we see a young Nahuatl-speaking Sor Juana who ardently advocates for the welfare of indigenous subjects and freely offers feminist views on a range of subjects. Sor Juana was not, of course, an avant la lettre feminist and social justice activist. She did, however, engage with the complexities of indigenous religion in the loa to the auto sacramental El Divino Narciso (2007) where, making use of the distance allegory permitted her, she offered a vision of the conquest and evangelization that recognized the importance of sacred ritual to the Aztecs while remaining loyal to a Christian and Creole vision of America.The loa opens with two indigenous allegorical figures, Occidente and América, who are discussing the feast of “el dios de la semilla” (the seed god). Here, Sor Juana’s text finds some common ground with Sigüenza’s within the framework of the baroque festival in which the indigenous faithful dance the tocotín in celebration of the dios de las semillas: “por una parte y otra bailan indios e indias, con plumas y sonajas en las manos” (indigenous men and woman dance around, with feathers and bells in their hands) (2007, 117). Moreover, as does Sigüenza, she highlights the question of indigenous nobility and antiquity when she introduces these characters, describing them as: “Nobles méxicanos,/cuya estirpe antigua,/de las claras luces/del sol se origina” (Noble mexicans/whose ancient lineage/ descends from the bright rays of the sun) (2007, 117). Unlike Sigüenza, however, she confronts details of indigenous religions that made the appropriation of their past so fraught for the Creole intellectual, addressing the rite of sacrifice and its role in indigenous cosmography and attempting to present it in the context in which it was employed by gesturing to its role in the maintenance of the social order. One of the two indigenous characters, Occidente (“Indio galán, con corona”—a gallant Indian, wearing a crown) describes the “sacrificios cruentos/de humana sangre vertida,/ya las entrañas que pulsan/ya el corazón que palpita,” (cruel human sacrifices that spill human blood, here pulsating entrails, there a heart that still beats) (2007, 117). América, his wife and “india bizarra” (dazzling Indian woman) counters, explaining: “Y con razón, pues es solo/él que nuestra monarquía/sustenta, pues la abundancia/de los frutos se le explica” (and with reason, it is this [sacrifice] alone that upholds our monarchy, and the abundance of fruits demonstrate it) (2007, 117). The Christian couple, Celo (described as a “Capitán General, armado”—Captain General, bearing arms) and Religión (a “Dama española”—a Spanish lady) also engage in debate as they discuss the most effective way to evangelize the idolatrous Indians. While both agree that native religious practices can best be deemed “supersticiosos cultos” (superstitious beliefs) they differ on how to make those who practice them abandon these rites. Celo embraces violent means while Religión favors a peaceful path to conversion. For Jáuregui (2003), the duality in Sor Juana’s representation 291

Stephanie Kirk

responds to the two intellectual traditions she inherited on this topic: one the d­ emonological— Durán, Motolinía—and the other the syncretic—Las Casas (210–211). For this critic, the figure of Religión with her proposal of conversion through non-violent means embodies Las Casas’s thought in Sor Juana (215). As a scholar who hewed closely to the Jesuit tradition, Sor Juana also drew on their syncretic philosophy as she engaged with the thorny and alienating question of the indigenous religious rite of sacrifice (Jáuregui 2003, 216). Celo and Religión, however, demonstrate a desire to collaborate in converting the natives. This mutual action and ideology indicate the impossibility of separating military action from religious in acts of conquest, colonization and evangelization as well as in the texts that were written in justification. Sor Juana’s loa shows her acknowledgment of the intellectual tradition underpinning this thorny relationship and permits her to present Creole knowledge of indigenous traditions at their most complex.10

Conclusion Colonial Creoles wrote their texts under a variety of circumstances and do not constitute a monolithic bloc. Although Sor Juana, for example, faced major constraints as she attempted to pursue a scholarly life due to the dearth of educational opportunities for women and the disapproval of the Church hierarchy, in some ways she enjoyed greater advantages than Sigüenza y Góngora owing to the level of patronage she received from the viceroys. Sigüenza himself, expelled from the Jesuits at a young age, wrote from outside the security of the order but nonetheless echoed their tenets in his work and longed to return to the safety of the fold from which Pérez de Ribas and other Jesuit authors engaged in intellectual activity. It is difficult, furthermore, to compare the intellectual life and publishing trajectory of Sor Juana to that of other nuns who wrote.11 These women crafted their spiritual biographies at the behest of and under the control of their confessors who would then take ownership in multiple ways over these texts. Despite their significant differences and disparate experiences, however, these writers find themselves linked in a network that placed the New World Church at its center. All drew their Creole knowledge from both its institutional and liturgical practices as well as its popular rituals and local mentalities and all negotiated their precarious path within the colonial matrix of power that rendered them vulnerable to the vagaries of imperial dominance but also ­complicit in its mechanisms of exclusion and subordination.

Notes 1 For an explanation of the meaning of patria for the Creole author see Anna More (2013). 2 In a few other lines, he references the “nunca vencidos escuadrones” (unvanquished squadrons) of the Aztec people who cede finally to the Spanish: “dando a su imperio y ley gentes extrañas/que le obedezcan; y añadiendo al mundo/una española isla y dos Españas” (handing over to their empire and laws strangers who will obey them; and adding a Spanish island and two Spains to the world)” (2006, 68). 3 For a discussion of the general circumstances surrounding the foundation of colonial Mexican convents see my Convent Life (Kirk 2016). 4 The Spanish captain of the soldiers who accompanied the missionaries executed the cacique in retaliation for Tapia’s death. No longer under his malevolent influence, many of his people finally accept Christ and receive the sacrament of baptism from the Jesuit missionaries. 5 For further information on the topic of convents for indigenous women along with the attendant racial politics, see Díaz (2010). 6 Joan Bristol’s study of the vida of Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, an Afro-Mexican woman and slave in the San José convent in Puebla, demonstrates how a discourse of exceptionalism attends the description of her piety in that despite her blackness she may be revered (2007, 56).

292

Creole knowledge in colonial Mexico 7 For a detailed discussion of the place of Afro-Mexican women in the colonial convent, see Bristol’s (2007) chapter on Juana Esperanza de San Alberto. 8 For a discussion of this gesture see Ross (1993, 68). 9 García interprets this section as a prefiguration of Christianity. He also explains how here Sigüenza directly refutes Durán who had critiqued Moteuczoma I for engaging in idolatry and superstitious practices (2009, 228). 10 I agree with Jáuregui that Sor Juana’s loa does not represent an “apología” (apology) for Aztec religious practices (2003, 210). 11 It is important to note that while other nuns did write spiritual texts and religious poetry Sor Juana’s case is unique in terms of the genres she worked in in—secular poetry, philosophy, theology, science— and in the wide circulation of her works in print in both Mexico and Spain.

Works cited Adorno, Rolena. 2011. Colonial Latin American Literature:A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ahern, Maureen. 1999. “Visual and Verbal Sites:The Construction of Jesuit Martyrdom in Northwest New Spain in Andrés Pérez de Ribas’ Historia de los Triumphos de nuestra Santa Fee (1645).” Colonial Latin American Review 8 (1): 7–33. Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2008. “Mignolo’s Epistemology of Coloniality.” CR:The New Centennial Review 7 (3): 79–101. Balbuena, Bernardo de. [1604] 2006. La grandeza mexicana. Compendio apologético en alabanza de la poesía. 7th ed. Mexico City: Porrúa. Bristol, Joan. 2007. Christians, Blasphemers, and Witches: Afro-Mexican Ritual Practice in the Seventeenth Century. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Connell, R. W. 2005. Masculinities. 2nd ed. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Díaz, Mónica. 2010. Indigenous Writings from the Convent. Austin: University of Texas Press. Dussel, Enrique. 1981. A History of the Church in Latin America: Colonialism to Liberation. Translated by Alan Neely. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. Foucault, Michel. 1997. “The Political Function of the Intellectual.” Translated by Colin Gordon. Radical Philosophy 17: 12–14. Franco, Jean. 1989. Plotting Women: Gender and Representation in Mexico. New York: Columbia University Press. Fuchs, Barbara, and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel. 2009. “La grandeza mexicana de Balbuena y el imaginario de una ‘metrópolis colonial’.” Revista Iberoamericana 75 (228): 675–695. García, Pablo. 2009. “Saldos del criollismo: el Teatro de virtudes políticas de Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora a la luz de la historiografía de Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl.” Colonial Latin American Review 18 (2): 219–235. Harris, Max. 2010. Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain. Austin: University of Texas Press. Jáuregui, Carlos A. 2003. “‘El plato más sabroso’: Eucaristía, plagio diabólico, y la traducción criolla del caníbal.” Colonial Latin American Review 12 (2): 199–231. Juana Inés, de la Cruz. [1689] 2007. “Loa para el auto sacramental de El Divino Narciso.” In Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Obras completas. 15th ed. Mexico City: Porrúa. ———. [1680] 2007. Neptuno alegórico. In Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Obras completas. 15th ed. Mexico City: Porrúa. Kaup, Monika. 2017. “Mexico City’s Dissonant Modernity and the Marketplace Baroque: Salvador Novo’s Nueva grandeza mexicana and Bernardo de Balbuena’s La grandeza mexicana.” In Neo-Baroques: From Latin America to the Hollywood Blockbuster, edited by Walter Moser, Angela Ndalianis, and Peter Krieger, 254–282. Leiden: Brill Rodopi. Kirk, Stephanie. 2007. Convent Life in Colonial Mexico: A Tale of Two Communities. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. ———. 2016. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Gender Politics of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico. London: Routledge. Lavrin, Asunción. 2008. Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

293

Stephanie Kirk ———. 2014. “Dying for Christ: Martyrdom in New Spain.” In Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas, edited by Stephanie Kirk and Sarah Rivett, 131–160. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lugones, María. 2010. “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” Hypatia 25 (4): 742–759. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2007. “On the Coloniality of Being.” Cultural Studies 21 (2): 240–270. ———. 2017. “Religion, Modernity, and Coloniality.” In Religion,Theory, Critique: Classic and Contemporary Approaches, edited by Richard King, 547–554. New York: Columbia University Press. Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda. 2008. From Lack to Excess: ‘Minor’ Readings of Latin American Colonial Discourse. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Mignolo,Walter D. 1995. The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Literacy,Territoriality and Colonization. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press. More, Anna. 2013. Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Myers, Kathleen Ann, ed. 1993 Word from New Spain: The Spiritual Autobiography of Madre Maria de San Jose (1656–1719). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Nesvig, Martin, ed. 2006. Local Religion in Colonial Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Oviedo, Juan Antonio de. 1702. Vida ejemplar, heroicas virtudes y apostólico ministerio del venerable padre Antonio Núñez de Miranda, de la Compañía de Jesús. Mexico City: Herededores de la Viuda de Francisco Rodriguez Lupercio. Pérez de Ribas, Andrés. [1645] 1944. Historia de los Triunfos de Nuestra Santa Fe entre gentes las más bárbaras … conseguidos por los soldados de la milicia de Ia Compañía de Jesús en las misiones de la Provincia de NuevaEspaña. Mexico City: Editorial Layac. Schroeder, Susan and Stafford Poole. 2015. Religion in New Spain. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla:Views from South 1 (3): 533–580. Ross, Kathleen. 1993. The Baroque Narrative of Sigüenza y Góngora. A New World Paradise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sampson Vera Tudela, Elisa. 2000. Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico, 1580–1750. Austin: University of Texas Press. Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos. [1692] 1984. Alboroto y motín de los indios de México. Seis obras, edited by William G. Bryant. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho. ———. [1684] 1995. Paraíso occidental. Mexico City: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. ———. [1680] 2005. Teatro de virtudes políticas que constituyen a un príncipe: advertidas en los monarcas antiguos del Mexicano Imperio, con cuyas efigies se hermoseó el Arcotriunfal que la … Ciudad de México erigió para … recibimiento del …Virrey Conde de Paredes, Marqués de La Laguna … / ideolo entonces y ahora lo describe D. Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes. http://www.cervantesvirtual. com/obra-visor/teatro-de-virtudes-politicas-que-constituyen-a-un-principe-advertidas-en-losmonarcas-antiguos-del-0/html/

294

17 THE COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN ARCHIVE Dispossession, ruins, reinvention Anna More

Emerging from the post-structuralist critique of historical studies, the “archival turn” approaches archives as material, spatial and discursive orders that actively structure knowledge of the past. Two theoretical paradigms in particular have grounded critical approaches to the archive. The first defines archives as institutions embedded in structural power relations.What might be called “archival power” militates against the idea that the archive is either a neutral medium or at best an impediment to be overcome for objective historical reconstruction. In his early work, Michel Foucault used the term “archive” in a broadly anti-materialist sense, as a figure for discursive totality. His later work exposed the individualizing or collective ways that this discursive totality is tied to a capillary power formative of both space and bodies.1 Jacques Derrida’s related approach has dissected the power captured by the term archive as etymologically tied both to origin and command. For Derrida, the archive is a spatial order that confers power to its guardians through an artifice of origin and control over memory (1996). These approaches have understood archives in the broadest sense, as any organizational system of storage and retrieval of documents. As opposed to these skeptical post-structuralist approaches, others have viewed the archive as a form of information management and have traced the emergence of historical archives in a more celebratory manner without explicitly addressing the structural effects of archives on historiography.2 A second critical approach has investigated archives as phenomenological spaces with both material and sensory effects on research. Often stemming from actual investigative practices, these studies reflect on the practice of writing history from the minutiae of archival labor.3 Documents are material objects, archives are social spaces and the practices of reading, notetaking and interpreting mountainous records are bodily ones “where the reader experiences beauty, amazement, and a certain affective terror” (Farge 2013, 31). Yet these studies say little about the archive’s relationship to forms of power in the present. Studies that draw their evidence from imperial contexts have provided a much broader consideration of the social and political impact of archives.4 Given the collusion of archives with colonialism and slavery, historians have approached archival documents not as “tear in the fabric of time” (Farge 2013, 7) but

295

Anna More

as structurally fragmented by colonialism or even as a “mortuary” for lives abruptly and prematurely extinguished from the record (Fuentes 2016, 146). These accounts of power and violence in the archive often note the effects on the historian and advocate for modes of writing that are speculative and reparative.5 Studies of the Latin American colonial archive have emerged in dialogue with these critical approaches while grounding their reflections on the specific relation between archives and Iberian empires.6 Indeed, Iberian empires contributed directly to the emergence of state archives, as the overseas expansion of monarchies and ecclesiastical orders demanded a bureaucratic record and governing institutions (Friedrich 2018, 16–28). Because Iberian institutions of governance and religion were tightly bound with their European counterparts, often what can be said about the European archive can also be stated for the Iberian imperial archive. Like the European archive, the archives of Iberian empires are dusty and labyrinthine.They give glimpses of subjects and provide insights into mentalities.Yet they are also marked by a violence beyond that which was experienced in the European metropolis. The cultural destruction, forced labor and the projects to radically transform nature and society across vast geographies both empowered and limited documentation in the Iberian world, distorting or entirely eliminating records for certain populations. The apostolic fervor of Christianization and the divergences between European and local institutions created suspicions and misunderstandings that augmented and focused religious violence. As Stoler has written, archival forms in colonial contexts were part of a greater attempt to govern what was often deemed chaotic and barbaric, better destroyed than preserved (Stoler 2002, 97–98, 101–2).7 In Latin America this ethos underlies periodic attempts to gather and centralize documents in general archives as well as the abandonment of collections. From documents that crumble at the touch to new attempts to digitize records, the initial foundations of the Latin American archive in the colonial period still permeate its forms in the present.8 Amid the numerous small tragedies that continually occur throughout the region, where archives on slim budgets face problems of theft, sagging infrastructure and challenges to preserving voluminous collections, there have been particularly resounding losses such as the devastating 2018 fire that destroyed the National Museum and its collection in Rio de Janeiro.9 The record of the Latin American colonial period is thus subject to paradoxical extremes. While imperial bureaucrats produced voluminous documentation, there are also immense lacunae in the written record. Attempts to control an empire with universal pretensions have co-existed with abandonment and purges of the past. The Latin American colonial archive is permeated by the excessive violence required to govern populations in various degrees of unfreedom. It is also the site of surprise and resilience that undoes master narratives of the past and the present. Writing history that makes explicit the structure and consequences of such an archive is inevitably a political project. To address the ways that Iberian colonialism and its ongoing legacy actively constructs the Latin American colonial archive, this chapter will focus on three fundamental movements: destruction as dispossession, the archive as ruin, and collection as reinvention. The Latin American colonial archive was a particular form of “accumulation by dispossession” that resulted from enslavement, forced migrations and the appropriation of land and material culture.10 If all archives are subject to hazards and decay, Iberian imperial archives have been particularly built on violent destruction or appropriation of collective practices of memory and record-keeping. At times, this destruction was deliberate, but at other times it was the indirect result of the interruption of social institutions or the removal of communities from their territories. In the aftermath, archives provided a filter for truth and state-authorized legitimacy for some objects and documents while others were deliberately abandoned or destroyed. 296

The colonial Latin American archive

Given their intimate relationship to destruction, Iberian imperial archives may be understood as ruins, in the sense that Walter Benjamin gave the term: remnants of the past that are structurally incomplete and frozen in time (More 2013, 50–52). Understanding the Latin American archive as a ruin underscores the interests and pressures involved in salvaging or collecting material objects in a colonial context. From artifacts in private collections, to ruins built into the landscape, to the documentation of non-material practices by bureaucrats or inquisitors, preservation inevitably involves interpretation, recomposition and reinvention. Archivists group and categorize artifacts following logics tied to their own whims or institutional objectives and produce new readings of documents through culturally conditioned hermeneutics. In a colonial context, objects are made enigmatic or “untranslatable” (Russo 2014, 6–7) as their contexts become scrambled. While attempts to reorder these objects may indicate creative responses or recovery after the loss of the original context, the violence in the colonial Latin American archive is never far below the surface. Indeed, the whitewashing of colonial violence persists in the naturalization of social categories such as “Indian” or “slave” as well as juridical and archival processes built around colonial identities (Bryant 2014; van Deusen 2015; Seed 2015). The colonial archive, in this sense, is the site of struggles that also take place in other material realms: over land, resources, and structures of governance. Acknowledging the continuity between archival and social conflicts has required that researchers adopt ethical and political stances while working in colonial archives. Archives are institutions that interpellate researchers according to their race, gender and other markers of identity that reach back to the colonial period. Including an analysis of the archive, then, has rightfully been seen as the necessary first step in writing histories that can move beyond the conditions set in place by Iberian colonization. At times, archival critique has led to a wholesale abandonment of the archive as complicit with colonial violence. At others, it has galvanized efforts to appropriate the archive as an institution and to advocate for greater public investment. In either case, the archive ceases to be an inert and neutral medium for historical study and instead becomes a formal and institutional structure for acting upon the politics of the past in the present.

Archival dispossession Under the aegis of centralized monarchies, Iberian imperial expansion demanded written documents, bureaucratic agents, and juridically sanctioned violence for control over territories. When Iberian monarchies invaded and occupied distant territories, they negotiated with nonEuropean polities and states, at times within the context of intense competition with other Europeans. From points along the geography of Iberian expansion, European agents of different types wrote to one another and to metropolitan centers of the Church and state, producing narratives, reports, letters, and juridical accounts. These documents were, in turn, stored in repositories throughout the Iberian empires and beyond. Archives of written documents, in this sense, were always key to Iberian colonialism. But archival accumulation was also subject to colonial conditions: papers went astray or were lost in shipwrecks, accounts were falsified to favor parties involved, and local officials and notaries decided what constituted information of value and what should be left to the dustbin of history. Above all, while written documents were kept for posterity, other artifacts were often subject to destruction or abandonment. Beginning as early as the Spanish and Portuguese expansion into Northern and Central Africa, these fundamental factors shaped the archives of Iberian Africa, Asia and the Americas. The Portuguese and Castilian occupation of African islands in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries provided a template for Iberian occupation of the Americas, including economic models based on sugar cultivation, enslaved labor, and trade for precious metals. Undertaken within the 297

Anna More

context of the religious wars between Christian and Islamic states, Iberian expansion into Africa also generated a parallel apostolic campaign that sought to convert non-Christians. Within this context, little of African culture was deliberately salvaged and safeguarded and objects deemed diabolic were even subject to destruction. Trade and contact, meanwhile, transformed both African and European cultural forms in subtle or obvious ways. With the conversion of Kongo kings, religious art and artifacts adopted Christian motifs while remaining crafted with African materials and artisan traditions (Fromont 2014). In other regions where Christianity did not take hold, written documents are scarce and those that exist are of more exclusively European origin (Green 2012, 21–22). Archives of this early period are thus particularly prone to a disparity between visual and written media, often with little to connect or contextualize the two. In the case of early Iberian Africa and the African diaspora, the discrepancy between African-made artifacts and European records creates insurmountable breaches in historiographical interpretation, often to the detriment of an African perspective on European territorial occupations and the slave trade. In the European record, Africans rarely appear by name while written records such as narratives and histories sought to elevate the status of Europeans at the helm of invasions, warfare and trade. From its earliest beginnings the transatlantic slave trade subjected those enslaved to a violence of abstract calculation of sales and profit. Thus the archive of the slave trade overwhelmingly registers enslaved Africans through a handful of terms. Even though Portuguese in Senegambia, Congo and Angola, the earliest regions of the slave trade, documented their knowledge of linguistic and cultural polities in their interactions with Africans, enslaved captives were most often recorded by pecuniary terms such as “black” [negro] and “piece” [pieza, peça] (Vila Vilar 2014, 185–191). Given that the documents of the slave trade reflect the interest of those who profited from the capture and sale of humans, the archive of the slave trade has demanded affective, imaginative and intellectual tools to offset its structural lacunae.11 In the Americas, the plantations and urban contexts of slavery generated more documentation, including juridical processes, inquisitorial records, ecclesiastical histories and reports of real and imagined rebellions. While spanning greater social detail than the violent language of calculation from the middle passage and Africa, these documents were almost always recorded from the perspective of colonial governance. To reconstruct Afro-Latino social life, researchers must bring creative tools to interpretation of an archive biased along the grain of race, class and gender. By shifting their questions, historians have been able to find Black lives “hiding in plain sight” (Edwards 2020), in religious accounts (Brewer-García 2019), court disputes over property and manumission (O’Toole 2019), and criminal cases involving status goods and clothing (Walker 2017). While urban contexts in which enslaved people lived and worked have thus come into view, the nature of Black societies in rural contexts, particularly runaway (maroon) societies, is subject to a more limited historical record (Price 1996; Reis and Gomes 1996). When researching and writing on people who were exposed to physical and psychological violence, who either fled slave regimes or attempted to avoid state detection, researchers have done extraordinary work to find stories in the archive and to reconstruct others by piecing together its fragments. If the archive of the transatlantic slave trade overwhelmingly focuses on finance and governance, the archive of the Iberian occupation of the Americas was built on the dispossession of indigenous land, material culture and practice.To the extent that Iberians recognized indigenous forms of record-keeping, they alternately destroyed or appropriated artifacts in acts of violence that paralleled the destruction of religious locales. In many regions, such as that of the Taino who were the first to experience Spanish invasion in the Caribbean, the accumulated effects of conquest and social decimation have made the reconstruction of pre-Columbian cultures almost

298

The colonial Latin American archive

fully dependent upon non-written remains (Arrom 1980; Arias 2015, 16). In cases such as the Tupi practice of anthropophagy, indigenous social practices were documented by highly skeptical or otherwise resistant European witnesses (Whitehead 2000). Even before openly attacking Tenochtitlan, Hernán Cortés systematically sacked and burned Nahua temples. In the Andes, the seventeenth-century extirpation of idolatry campaigns resulted in the public burning of personal objects that the extirpators had identified as sacred [huacas]. One of the earliest and most notorious acts of destruction of indigenous objects was by the Franciscan friar Diego de Landa (1524–1579), who in 1562 burned numerous codices of the Yucatec Maya (Farriss 1984, 291; de Landa 2017). His own account reproduces fragments from what he burned as a means to justify the necessity of such violence. While Maya glyphs may be found throughout the region on built structures, only a handful of pre-Columbian codices survived de Landa’s bonfire. The act underscores an irony: often the very institutions that targeted some objects for destruction also salvaged and safeguarded others. These movements cannot be segregated, as often they were simply distinct responses to what the Church deemed idolatrous or demonic. The most extensive account of the pre-Columbian central valley of Mexico, for instance, is contained in the Florentine Codex [Códice florentino], an encyclopedic project that covered aspects of pre-Columbian culture, including religion, family life, education and work. Relying on indigenous youth trained at the Colegio de San Juan de Tlatelolco to gather information and write the encyclopedia, the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590) finished twelve books in parallel texts in Nahuatl and Spanish, accompanied by detailed illustrations. The collaboration between Sahagún and the indigenous researchers and writers is still little understood, but the relative autonomy of the three parts of the text, none of which perfectly translates the other, and the fact that Sahagún felt the need to heavily edit the Spanish translation suggest that the indigenous authors had a strong influence over the content (Terraciano 2010, 62). While pre-Columbian practices might have employed a number of visual or material means to codify and store information, the conquest left many of the institutions responsible for reproducing this knowledge destroyed or in tatters. Colonial projects such as the Florentine Codex ended up employing some pre-Columbian scribal practices in modified forms, thus inadvertently carrying them on. One of the most extensive records created through continuous practices of this sort are the Geographical Relations [Relaciones Geográficas] created at the end of the sixteenth century in New Spain. As part of a bureaucratic program to gain knowledge of his expanding empire, Phillip II requested that regional governing bodies send in responses to a survey that covered local history, territories and census information. In New Spain the responses from indigenous communities themselves often reflect upon the destruction of local forms of memory during and after the conquest. Many maps included in the reports mixed indigenous and Spanish spatial and cartographic concepts. The community histories also mixed indigenous and Christian references, at times not even registering the events of the conquest (Gruzinski 1993, 79). While these community responses provide documents for an expanding imperial bureaucracy, by gathering together what is left of pre-Columbian systems of knowledge they also record indigenous archival functions that continued at the edges of Iberian control. In the preface to the Mayan cosmogonic book of the Popol Vuh, for instance, the anonymous scribes enigmatically refer to having to “write about this now… bring it out because there is no longer a place to see it, a Council Book” in what appears to be a reference to the need to document beliefs that were under attack or disappearing (Anon 1996, 63; Tedlock 1996). These are only the clearest examples of how indigenous forms of record-keeping engaged the destructive aftermath of conquest and colonization.

299

Anna More

Archival ruins The colonial Latin American archive could thus be said to contain the ruins of indigenous and African material culture and practices. After the Spanish and Portuguese conquests, of course, the landscape of the Americas was littered with the material remnants of pre-Columbian cultures. These physical remains were reminders of past political, cultural and sacred institutions destroyed, displaced or appropriated by the Iberian colonizers. Material ruins of the monumental structures of the Incan and Mexica polities were the most spectacular, but one could extend the concept of the ruin to cover less visible changes to the land as well. For the Tupi and Tapuia peoples of the Atlantic coast of what would eventually become Brazil, the destruction wrought by rapacious logging and internecine warfare among competing Europeans must have been just as notable (Dean 1995, 66–90). Later, the large-scale commodity agriculture and mining, as well as the urban engineering projects such as the drainage of Lake Texcoco [desagüe] in Mexico City appropriated indigenous technologies, at times destroying and at other times diverting these to new political ends (Candiani 2012). In Uruguay, cattle ranching has contributed to the destruction of indigenous mounds that are literally built into the landscape (Verdesio 2001). Yet ruins included not only visibly abandoned structures, but all objects and practices whose original use and significance were altered under Spanish and Portuguese dominion. Whereas colonial indigenous memory in Mexico has been called a “torn net” (Gruzinski 1993, 15) it would perhaps be more productive to understand how surviving forms and practices became part of the colonial archive, preserved and resignified as archival ruins. At times, the ruins within the colonial archives were brought to the fore, as in the famous Royal Commentaries [Comentarios reales] (1609) in which the Cuzcan mestizo, Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1539–1616), justified his need to write the history of his royal Incan ancestors because Cuzco was “destroyed before it was even known” (Garcilaso 1999, 50). The ruin becomes a significant metaphor for his writing of history, which he calls a “labyrinth” in reference to the ancient maze found under the ruins of the largest Incan fort, Sacsawaman (Mazzotti 1996; Cortez 2018, 65). By the end of the seventeenth century, European Americans (creoles) were also taking an interest in pre-Columbian ruins in their midst. Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645–1700), the Mexican polymath who was an avid collector of indigenous codices and artifacts was also fascinated by the standing pyramids of Teotihuacán, the legacy of the Toltecs, predecessors to the Nahuas in the central valley of Mexico (Bernal 1980; More 2013, 56). Archival ruins haunted the colonial Iberian Americas as material reminders of a past whose original project was simultaneously palpable and inaccessible to the archivists. The interest among elite creoles in indigenous ruins was tied to other forms of archival consolidation and state-building. While it is clear that the Iberian colonial states did not fully control the production and archiving of documents, state-aligned institutions were most often responsible for initiating documentation, safeguarding it in material and spatial ways, and policing its purpose, access and use. Colonial archivists inevitably preserved these remains for purposes distinct from their original context, most often to further the interests of the Iberian states or the Church. Indeed, aside from those few but spectacular instances when individuals such as Guaman Poma de Ayala or communities such as the Maya Ki’che’, who preserved the Popol Vuh, appear to have acted autonomously to write or to protect patrimony, documentation in the colonial archive was produced by practices linked to elite economic and governmental interests. When they did exist, moreover, indigenous archives were created within the scope of Iberian imperial projects. Entering into the archive inevitably involved participating in the project of preservation under Iberian colonialism. 300

The colonial Latin American archive

In fact, it is precisely this mediating nature of the colonial archive that permitted the documentation of social diversity across the hemisphere. To take the complex example of the Inquisition, the core goal of rooting out heresy ended up documenting its extension and heterogeneity. Inquisition records also provide one of the richest archives of enslaved and free Africans and their descendants. While the Spanish Inquisition early on exempted indigenous subjects from its jurisdiction, seventeenth-century extirpation of idolatry campaigns in New Spain and Peru employed similar forensic techniques and had parallel objectives of eliminating “idolatrous” residues in colonial Christianity (Gruzinski 1993, 146–183; Mills 1997). In the end, this attempt to document and punish has provided a storehouse of information on colonial social practices, from sacred to sexual.Yet inquisitors recorded these practices for the purpose of eradicating them and thus do not deliberately reconstruct the social context in which they occurred. The present-day researcher is faced with the challenge of parsing out practices from a record tainted by categories such as “idolatry” and “unnatural” [contra natura] sexual practices (Tortorici 2018). Despite producing voluminous documentation, such disciplinary institutions of the colonial Iberias were far from systematic. The appearance of non-elite colonial subjects in the state archives was almost always the result of happenstance. One can think, for instance, of the Maya translator who aided the Spanish, commonly known as Malinche (c. 1501–1550). Although Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1496–1584) declared that without her the conquest could not have happened, there is a paucity of basic information about her life (Townsend 2006, 5). At other times, if they were caught up in a complex juridical case, otherwise anonymous subjects could appear delineated with some complexity. Stretching across three continents, the documentation of the eighteenth-century African healer Domingues Alvares (c. 1710–1749?), who was captured and enslaved in West Africa, freed in Brazil and then subsequently imprisoned by the Inquisition and exiled to Portugal after his healing abilities had garnered him fame, permits the reconstruction of his life in surprising detail (Sweet 2011). Other times, non-elite subjects proved to be able participants in the colonial legal structure and appear, even incongruously, in records that were not intended to favor their positions (O’Toole 2012; Kazanjian 2016). The entrance of common subjects into the archive inevitably involved mediation, ranging from negotiation with petty bureaucrats to commoners who insisted on being heard by officials in quests for justice (Burns 2010; Delgado 2018; More and Premo 2018).The function of documenting and archiving depended to a great extent on related local conditions. These might include the discretionary power of low-level officials or notaries, the politics of institutions such as the Inquisition, or popular legal culture and access to courts. Notaries in Cuzco, Peru, for instance, were instrumental in deciding what to document, most often for immediate political or financial gain rather than the interest of the colonial state (Burns 2010). At times this discretionary power meant that subjects might appear, objects might be salvaged or perspectives that are more local than imperial might be registered in documents. At other times, such as in the spectacular case of the Portuguese slave trader Manuel Bautista Perez (1589–1639), active in Upper Guinea, Cartagena de Indias and Lima in the first decades of the seventeenth century, a bureaucratic sweep caught many extraneous and personal documents in its net (Newson and Minchin 2007, 15–17). To call an archive a ruin is to assume that in destroying contexts or attempting to control non-Iberian practices, colonial governance preserved the memory of these practices in ways that continued to influence colonial culture. But while the archive may be considered a ruin in the positive sense, as an index or pointer toward what lies just beyond or contrary to its governmental purpose, this same characteristic has also been understood to be a mode of “capture” of reluctant subjects. As scant mention of runaway slaves appears in documentation in the African 301

Anna More

theater of enslavement or on runaway slave communities in the Americas, those who do not appear in the record might very well be understood to have escaped (Krug 2018, 9–10). Of course, evidence of escape always depends on this archival register; finding subjects entirely outside of the record is impossible. In the case of a negative presence in the archive, that is, researchers must begin with the barest traces or marshal alternative archives and then interpret in the speculative mode. Ruins, in other words, attract and seduce precisely because of the missing spaces where structures have been partially destroyed. When pursuing deviance in the archive, whether sexual or otherwise, the researcher, like the inquisitor, is determined by an affective force of attraction or repulsion and perhaps by the ambivalence of desire (Tortorici 2018).

Archival reinvention Current researchers thus cannot be fully divorced from the archival sedimentation of the many hands and political decisions that have gone into preserving the past. The researcher, of course, has a distinct role as an interpreter that is often at odds with the institutional purpose of the archive. Yet the archival turn has exposed the extent to which the archive wields a particular power that accrues through the segregation, ordering and enclosure of documents. In his influential meditation on the archive, Jacques Derrida writes that “there is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory” (1996, 4). All researchers must negotiate with this institutional power to gain access to the archive. Yet Derrida’s account does not reflect the diverse forms of documentation and the potential for alternative archives present in colonial Latin American societies.These multiple archives provide contradictory or competing narratives of the past and certainly divergent views of the importance of these for the present. Many times, the institution of the archive itself becomes the crowning achievement of governance, one that consolidates a longer battle over documents and their meaning. Even before they enter the archive, therefore, researchers must navigate the politics of these competing histories and interpretations of the Latin American past, some of which are embedded in documentation and others of which are barely visible. These multiple stories available in the archive are often the result of overlapping processes of documentation and storage. Understanding this, Iberian empires attempted at key moments to consolidate their archives into singular or “general” archives: the Spanish in Simancas in the sixteenth century and in the Archivo General de Indias in the eighteenth; the Portuguese in the medieval Torre do Tombo and in the combined archives of the Overseas Council [Conselho Ultramarino] and the State Department of Naval Affairs and Overseas Domains [Secretaria de Estado da Marinha e dos Domínios Ultramarinos] in the eighteenth century (Martins 2018, 40). These attempts at consolidation only underscore the fact that most preservation has fallen to smaller and more local efforts, like individual collectors or local state and Church institutions. The history of the archive of colonial Latin America, then, must include the efforts of these myriad archives and the power afforded to archivists. However seemingly insignificant, such as the personal project of an individual collector, archives were often linked to militant purposes, especially when larger political institutions seemed to falter. Attempts to create a general archive composed of smaller archives, such as the establishment of the Archivo General de Indias in the eighteenth century, were also attempts to create order out of the “confused forest” [selva confusa] of past archives (Slade 2011, 206). The general archive, therefore, is an eminently political project that aims to appropriate space and institute order at moments of renewed state-building (Rufer 2016, 166). These sedimented attempts to salvage the past give the colonial Latin American archive a sutured and haphazard composition. Beginning with Hernán Cortés’ conquest of Tenochtitlan, 302

The colonial Latin American archive

objects were preserved and displayed as trophies in European courts if deemed to be symbolically important or converted into bullion or other direct forms of wealth if not (Johnson 2011, 89). The history of the destruction or dispersal of indigenous objects from the time of Iberian invasion to the present illustrates how collections, libraries and archives have often competed with or complemented one another. This history is itself difficult to research, with objects passing through various hands, at times arriving and being consigned to forgotten corners of a collection or being associated with general categories that have little correspondence to the original purpose of the object or document. Discoveries such as that of the encyclopedic manuscript of Guaman Poma de Ayala (c. 1535–1616?) are often little more than a recognition of the value of a manuscript that has been known for centuries (Adorno 1992, xliii–iv). In some rare cases, it is possible to trace the history of a collection and, in this way, to elucidate how the archive itself, as a composed order, could be used to bolster political narratives. There is perhaps no more spectacular and detailed case of the intersection between preservation and political interest than the collection of the Mexican polymath, Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. An elite creole, Sigüenza y Góngora espoused an antiquarian’s interest in the indigenous past at the moment when the Spanish Empire was faltering on the global stage. For Sigüenza y Góngora, salvaging objects “pertaining to matters of the Indies” was a means to refound local governance in Mexico in the face of Spanish imperial decline (More 2013, 254–55). Tellingly, however, the majority of Sigüenza’s indigenous collection came from one source: Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl (ca. 1578–1650), a mestizo from the ruling line of Texcoco outside of Mexico City who, in the previous generation, had himself been a collector of objects relating to his region (Brian 2016). Sigüenza’s appropriation of the Ixtlilxochitl collection was a bid to promote the history of indigenous nobility against what he interpreted, during the massive 1692 uprising in Mexico City, as the resentful history of indigenous commoners who sought vengeance for the conquest and a return to pre-Columbian religion (More 2013, 180). The most compelling story that can be told from a case such as Sigüenza y Góngora’s, then, is about the power of the archive to ground and align local political projects at key turning points in Spanish imperial history. While the most powerful archives were undoubtedly aligned with Iberian imperial power, collections such as Ixtlilxochitl’s and Sigüenza y Góngora’s could introduce nuances into this power. Archival projects such as these were also woven through different expressive genres, giving new symbolic meaning to objects. In her short theatrical piece preceding the religious play the Divine Narcissus [El divino Narciso] (1689), for instance, the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648–1695) referenced the Mexica practice of ingesting seed statues representing the war god Huitzilopochtli not as an instigation to present rebellion but as an analogy to communion and thus precursor to Catholic conversion (Merrim 2010, 190–2). Non-Europeans also appropriated European forms for their own purposes. Throughout the Americas, for instance, festival performances featured indigenous and Black confraternities who performed by adapting the European form with non-European cultural practices such as music and dance (Taylor 2003; Voigt 2016; Fromont 2019). Many times, objects included in these archives, whether elite or non-elite, are irreducible to any one cultural origin or purpose. While these images in the colonial Latin American archive express dissonant perspectives, in some sense all colonial texts that take up non-European topics might be said to be archival in a similar way.

Conclusion: archival reading, archival writing When the archive as a historical and political construction comes into view in scholarship, the relationship of the researcher to what might otherwise be understood to be the bureaucratic minutiae of the archives itself becomes a reflection of archival power. The politics of closed or 303

Anna More

open archives, their exclusive or public nature, their spatial and physical conditions, their different receptiveness to researchers depending on status, gender and race all become part of the interpretation of how archives serve as arbiters of truth. Whether researching in the Archivo General de Indias on the dispossession that preceded its foundation (Nemser 2015), studying manuscripts on the location of a Colombian plantation under the watchful gaze of the portrait of the patriarch (Barragán 2017), or attending to the imaginative and performative recreation of the case of a Mexican dual sex subject (Martínez 2014), the archive becomes an affective space that makes political demands on researchers. An archival reading requires a greater attention to the origin of information, its genealogy of contexts beyond the text, its own history of dispossession and appropriation and the politics of legibility as a mode of access. This approach demands an ethics and a politics that is presentist but attuned to a sedimentation of actions, not all of which can be proven in a record that is often complicit with governmental interests. The archival writing of history that results from these inquiries tests the boundaries of disciplinary modes of truth or exposes deeply held assumptions about being and action. Many of the most provocative archival approaches to colonial Latin American texts employ a speculative tone, acknowledging the limits of evidence and complementing what can be known through alternative sources or the imagination. The existence of certain subjects in the archive, at times against all odds, can be the basis for a realignment of our very assumptions about freedom and survival (Kazanjian 2016). When faced with a “story that cannot be told” from the archive, on the other hand, speculative historians have turned to composite portraits, as of women violently subjected to slave governance in Barbados (Fuentes 2016) or “critical fabulation” to imagine the subjects of violence barely registered in the archive of the slave trade (Hartman 2006). At the limit point of this narrative speculation and speech, archival expression finds form in scattered words and letters on the blank page, as in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008) a poetic invocation of the voices missing from the records of the slave trade. If all archives stave off death, decay and abandonment, the colonial Latin American archive is marked by its constitutional violence. Archives are built to tame this violence, to bring order to unruliness and heterogeneity or to domesticate and contain rebellion. Bringing the archive into view rather than treating it as a neutral medium has necessarily brought to the fore this structural violence in ways that link the colonial past to the present. To study the archive, then, has meant to resist ideas of neutrality, objectivity and empiricism that have framed other historiographical approaches. Once the archive is understood to be grounded on colonial structures, the disruptions, eruptions and silences that it contains appear less as gaps to be filled in than points to speculate about what might be done with its ruins. By acknowledging these structural forms of violence and admitting speculative forms of expression, critical archival approaches to colonial Latin America have pushed the limits of historiography to a new poetics and praxis.

Notes 1 Foucault’s influential use of the term “archive” may be found in The Archeology of Knowledge in which he defines it as “the general system of the formation and transformation of statements” at any given time (1972, 146). On Foucault’s approach to capillary power and bodies, see Butler (1997, 83–105). Foucault himself was working directly from Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of origins in The Genealogy of Morals. See Foucault (1977). 2 See, for instance, Marcus Friedrich’s The Birth of the Archive (2018). Bruno Latour’s action-networktheory has been instrumental to studies of early modern global knowledge networks. See, for example, Steven Harris’s work on Jesuit correspondence and information management in Harris (1996, 1999). 3 Arlette Farge’s The Allure of Archives (2013) and Carolyn Steedman’s Dust (2002) have both taken as their object their own research in the archives of early modern France and England, respectively.

304

The colonial Latin American archive 4 Ann Stoler’s work on the colonial Dutch archives of Indonesia (2009) or Marisa Fuentes’ work on the archives of racialized and gendered violence in seventeenth-century Barbados (2016) have exposed the structural ways in which archives embedded extractive and governmental violence in these contexts. 5 Saidiya Hartman advocates “critical fabulation” (2006, 11) as a means to supplement and counteract the constitutional limitations of the archive of slavery, to write history “with and against the archive” (12). 6 The first work to take on the archive as a critical tool for studying colonial Latin America was Roberto González Echevarría’s Myth and Archive (1998), which was inspired by Foucault’s approach to the archive as a discursive condition. Antony Higgins, Constructing the Criollo Archive (2000), Stephanie Merrim’s The Spectacular City (2010), my Baroque Sovereignty (2013), Amber Brian’s Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Native Archive (2016), Enrique Cortez’s Biografía y polémica (2018) and Zeb Tortorici’s Sins against Nature (2018) all draw on various critical traditions mentioned in this article. Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire (2003) takes a very different approach to textual investigations by working with performance as a form of embodied memory. As mentioned above, the African diaspora and the slave trade is another source of investigation of the archive, this time not limited to Spanish and Portuguese sources. For a recent collection of essays that draws together many of these strands, see Gorbach and Rufer (2016). 7 In this sense, the archive follows the governmental function that Ángel Rama (1984) attributed to “the lettered city” from the colonial period on. 8 For an ambitious digitization project, see the Slave Societies Digital Archive: https://www.slavesocieties.org/. Digitizing, however, erases the original information on ordering and origin of documents (Bianca Premo, participation in the roundtable “Archives Burning,” American Historical Association, 2019). 9 For a moving reflection on the fire as the result of state abandonment, see Alexandra Prado Coelho’s (2018) interview with the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. 10 The phrase “accumulation by dispossession” is David Harvey’s (2004). For an insightful application to the consolidation of the General Archive of Indies in eighteenth-century Spain, see Nemser (2015). 11 See below for a discussion of the work of Marisa Fuentes (2016), Saidiya Hartman (2006) and M. NourbeSe Philip (2008).

Works cited Adorno, Rolena. 1992. “La redacción y enmendación del autógrafo de La nueva corónica y buen gobierno.” In El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno, edited by Rolena Adorno and John V. Murra, xxxii–xlv. Mexico City: Siglo XXI. American Historical Association. 2019.“Archives Burning: The Fire at the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro and Beyond.” Roundtable. American Historical Association 133rd Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, January 4, 2019. Anon. 1996. Popul Vuh:The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings. Translated by Dennis Tedlock. New York: Touchstone. Arias, Santa. 2015. “Reconstituting the Archive: The Ancient Indigenous World.” In Cambridge History of Latin American Women’s Literature, edited by Ileana Rodríguez and Mónica Szurmuk, 11–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Arrom, José. 1980. “Taino Mythology: Notes on the Supreme Being.” Latin American Literary Review 8 (16): 21–37. Barragán,Yesenia. 2017. “Justo’s Death: Slave Burials and Spiritual Justice on the Colombian Pacific.” Paper delivered at Race and Religion in the Americas and the Atlantic World: A Conference in Honor of María Elena Martínez, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, March 4, 2017. Bernal, Ignacio. 1980. A History of Mexican Archaeology. London: Thames and Hudson. Brewer-García, Larissa. 2019.“Hierarchy and Holiness in the Earliest Colonial Black Hagiographies: Alonso de Sandoval and His Sources.” The William and Mary Quarterly 76 (3): 477–508. Brian, Amber. 2016. Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s Native Archive and the Circulation of Knowledge in Colonial Mexico. Nashville, TN:Vanderbilt University Press. Bryant, Sherwin. 2014. Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage: Governing through Slavery in Colonial Quito. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Burns, Kathryn. 2010. Into the Archive:Writing and Power in Colonial Peru. Durham: Duke University Press. Butler, Judith. 1997. The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Candiani, Vera. 2012. “The Desagüe Reconsidered: Environmental Dimensions of Class Conflict in Colonial Mexico.” Hispanic American Historical Review 92 (1): 5–39.

305

Anna More Coelho, Alexandra Prado. 2018. “Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: ‘Gostaria que o Museu Nacional permanecesse como ruína, memória das coisas mortas’.” Ipsilon, September 2, 2018. Cortez, Enrique E. 2018. Biografía y polémica: El Inca Garcilaso y el archivo colonial andino en el siglo XIX. Madrid/Frankfurt am Main: Iberoamericana/Vervuert. Dean, Walter. 1995. With Broadax and Firebrand:The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic. Berkeley: University of California Press. Delgado, Jessica. 2018. Laywomen and the Making of Colonial Catholicism in New Spain, 1630–1790. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Edwards, Erika. 2020. Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Farge, Arlette. 2013. The Allure of the Archives. Translated by Thomas Scott-Railton. New Haven: Yale University Press. Farriss, Nancy. 1984. Maya Society under Spanish Rule: A Collective Enterprise of Survival. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fromont, Cécile. 2014. The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. ———, ed. 2019. Afro-Catholic Festivals in the Americas: Performance, Representation, and the Making of Black Atlantic Tradition. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Foucault, Michel. 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. ———. 1977. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, edited by Donald F. Bouchard, 139–164. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Friedrich, Markus. 2018. The Birth of the Archive: A History of Knowledge. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Fuentes, Marisa J. 2016. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women,Violence and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Garcilaso de la Vega, El Inca. 1999. Comentarios reales de los incas. 2 vols. Vol. 1. Lima: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Gonzalez Echevarría, Roberto. 1998. Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narrative. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Gorbach, Frida, and Mario Rufer, eds. 2016. (In)disciplinar la investigación: Archivo, trabajo de campo y escritura. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana/Siglo XXI. Green, Toby. 2012. The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300–1589. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gruzinski, Serge. 1993. The Conquest of Mexico: The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, 16th–18th Centuries. Translated by Eileen Corrigan. Cambridge: Polity. Harris, Steven J. 1996. “Confession-Building, Long-Distance Networks, and the Organization of Jesuit Science.” Early Science and Medicine 1 (3): 287–318. ——— 1999. “Mapping Jesuit Science:The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge.” In The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, edited by John O’Malley, 212–240. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hartman, Saidiya. 2006. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 26: 1–14. Harvey, David. 2004. “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession.” Socialist Register 40 (1): 63–87. Higgins, Antony. 2000. Constructing the Criollo Archive. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Johnson, Carina L. 2011. “Aztec Regalia and the Reformation of Display.” In Collecting across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, edited by Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall, 83–98. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kazanjian, David. 2016. “Freedom’s Surprise: Two Paths through Slavery’s Archives.” History of the Present 6 (2): 133–145. Krug, Jessica. 2018. Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Landa, Diego de. 2017. Relación de las cosas de Yucatán. Edited by Miguel Rivera Dorado. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.

306

The colonial Latin American archive Martínez, María Elena. 2014. “Archives, Bodies, and Imagination: The Case of Juana Aguilar and Queer Approaches to History, Sexuality, and Politics.” Radical History Review (120): 159–182. Martins, Ana Canas Delgado. 2018. “A documentação do Conselho Ultramarino como património arquivístico comum: subsídios à sua história.” Revista Brasileira de História 38 (78): 39–54. Mazzotti, José Antonio. 1996.“The Lightning Bolt Yields to the Rainbow: Indigenous History and Colonial Semiosis in the Royal Commentaries of the Inca Garcilaso.” MLQ 57 (2): 197–211. Merrim, Stephanie. 2010. The Spectacular City, Mexico, and Colonial Hispanic Literary Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press. Mills, Kenneth. 1997. Idolatry and its Enemies: Colonial Andean Religion and Extirpation, 1640–1750. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. More, Anna. 2013. Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. More, Anna, and Bianca Premo. 2018. “Opening the Colonial Archive.” Hemisphere: A Magazine of the Americas, 7–10. Nemser, Daniel. 2015. “Eviction and the Archive: Materials for an Archaeology of the Archivo General de Indias.” Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 16 (2): 123–141. Newson, Linda A., and Susie Minchin. 2007. From Capture to Sale:The Portuguese Slave Trade to Spanish South America in the Early Seventeenth Century. Leiden: Brill. O’Toole, Rachel Sarah. 2012. Bound Lives:Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. ———. 2019. “Household Challenges: the Laws of Slaveholding and the Practices of Freedom in Colonial Peru.” In Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization, edited by Ivonne del Valle, Anna More, and Rachel Sarah O’Toole, 159–182. Nashville:Vanderbilt University Press. Philip, M. NourbeSe. 2008. Zong! Middletown, CT: Weslyan University Press. Price, Richard, ed. 1996. Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas. 3rd ed. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rama, Ángel. 1984. La ciudad letrada. Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte. Reis, João José, and Flávio dos Santos Gomes, eds. 1996. Liberdade por um Fio: História dos Quilombos no Brasil. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras. Rufer, Mario. 2016. “El archivo: de la metáfora extractiva a la ruptura poscolonial.” In (In)disciplinar la investigación: archivo, trabajo de campo y escritura, edited by Frida Gorbach and Mario Rufer, 160–186. Mexico City: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana/Siglo XXI. Russo, Alessandra. 2014. The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Austin: University of Texas Press. Seed, Patricia. 2015. “How Globalization Invented Indians in the Caribbean.” In Caribbean Globalizations, 1492 to the Present Day, edited by Eva Sansavior and Richard Scholar, 58–82. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Slade, David. 2011. “An Imperial Knowledge Space for Bourbon Spain: Juan Bautista Muñoz and the Founding of the Archivo General de Indias.” Colonial Latin American Review 20 (2): 195–212. Slave Societies Digital Archive, 2020. https://www.slavesocieties.org/ Steedman, Carolyn. 2002. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History. Encounters: Cultural Histories, vol. 106. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stoler, Ann Laura. 2002. “Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance.” Archival Science 2: 87–109. ———. 2009. Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sweet, James H. 2011. Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Tedlock, Dennis. 1996. “Introduction.” In Popul Vuh:The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings, edited by Dennis Tedlock, 21–60. New York: Touchstone. Terraciano, Kevin. 2010. “Three Texts in One: Book XII of the Florentine Codex.” Ethnohistory 57 (1): 51–72. Tortorici, Zeb. 2018. Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Townsend, Camilla. 2006. Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

307

Anna More Van Deusen, Nancy E. 2015. Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Verdesio, Gustavo. 2001. “Forgotten Territorialities: The Materiality of Indigenous Pasts.” Nepantla: Views from the South 2 (1): 85–114. Vila Vilar, Enriqueta. 2014. Hispanoamérica y el comercio de esclavos. 2nd ed. Seville: Universidad de Sevilla. Voigt, Lisa. 2016. Spectacular Wealth:The Festivals of Colonial South American Mining Towns. Austin: University of Texas Press. Walker, Tamara. 2017. Exquisite Slaves: Race, Clothing, and Status in Colonial Lima. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitehead, Neil. 2000. “Hans Staden and the Cultural Politics of Cannibalism.” Hispanic American Historical Review 80 (4): 721–751.

308

18 MATERIALITIES AND ARCHIVES Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez

Colonial materialities and the history of art The study of colonial materialities has historically been primarily situated within the history of art and architecture. As a specialized subfield, colonial or viceregal art of the Americas was slow to develop, becoming established well after the art of the Ancient Americas (i.e., pre-Columbian), Modern, and Contemporary Latin American art. Pre-Columbian was the first subfield to emerge in academe from the 1920s to the 1940s, tied to national foundation myths (as in Mexico), and flourishing more fully in the 1960s and 1970s (Bailey Waddell 1978, 1; Boone 1979, 2; Klein 2002, 131–8; Garrigan 2012, 70). Scholarship on Modern and Contemporary art burgeoned in the wake of the Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 1970s that brought fame to such writers as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others (Herrera and Gaztambide 2017, 3–8). The field of colonial art did not begin to thrive until the 1980s and 1990s, as evidenced by publications and university hires (Bailey, Phillips, and Voigt 2009, 1; Cembalest 2010). Negative perceptions of colonial art, with its “impure” mix of European and indigenous influences, and its association with colonization and the Catholic Church, seem to have impeded earlier scholarly study (Bailey Waddell 1978, 2–3; Cembalest 2010). Some art historians found colonial art and architecture derivative and deficient in comparison to contemporaneous European art. For precisely the reasons that delayed its study—its hybridity or even “impurity”—colonial art began to be considered as on the “cutting edge” of art historical study in the first decades of the 2000s (Bailey, Phillips, and Voigt 2009, 1; Cembalest 2010). The earliest scholarship in colonial art and architectural history was produced in Latin America and Spain, developing later in the US. The first publications and faculty positions in colonial art date to the first half of the twentieth century. In Mexico, the art historian Manuel Toussaint (1890–1955), described there as the creator of “the discipline of art history,” founded the first faculty chair in Viceregal Art in 1936 at Mexico’s Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) (Weismann 1967, vii). Toussaint published a number of important studies of colonial art in Mexico in the 1920s to 1940s, including the 1924 volume Iglesias de México, coauthored with Dr. Atl and José Benítez, and his 1948 Arte colonial en México, which laid out the entire field of colonial art for the first time (Weismann 1956a, 269). In Spain, the distinguished art historian Diego Angulo Íñiguez (1901–1986) was another seminal voice. He authored key early studies of art and architecture from the 1930s to the 1950s, including the important survey Historia del arte hispano-americano, first printed in 1943. Angulo’s distinguished career began in 309

Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez

1922 at the Museo del Prado, where he later served as director (1968–1971), followed by a professorship at the University of Granada in 1925, which he left to take up the newly created chair of Hispano-American Art at the University of Seville, established in anticipation of the 1929 World Fair (Calvo Serraller 1986; Pérez Sánchez n.d.). In 1934 Angulo was named scholar in residence at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. While there, he discussed with Toussaint the idea of establishing a specialized art historical laboratory or institute at UNAM, similar to the Laboratorio de Arte at the University of Seville, as a means of promoting Mexican art (Krieger 2009, 176). Subsequently, in 1935, the Laboratorio de Arte was established, its name changing to the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas in 1936, and its journal, Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas was created, both under the auspices of the University of Seville’s Laboratorio de Arte (Weismann 1967, viii; Krieger 2009, 173). The study of colonial art in Mexico was thus conditioned from its origins by scholarly frameworks imported from Spain. Early studies of colonial art in South America emerged around the same time as in Mexico, in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. They were hampered by nationalist rivalries between the various countries that had once comprised the same viceroyalty (Bailey, Phillips, and Voigt 2009, 3–6). In the US, several scholars began to work on colonial art in the 1930s and 1940s, among them George Kubler (1912–1996), who began to teach at Yale University in 1938, and Sidney David Markman (1911–2011), specialist in Central American and pre-Columbian art and architecture, who taught at Duke University from 1965 until his 1981 retirement (Wilder 1941, 6; Klein 2002, 133; Howerton & Bryan 2011). The first course at a US university on colonial art was taught by Kubler in 1939–1940 at Yale University (Klein 2002, 133;Wilder 1941, 6). During the upheaval of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) some Hispanists shifted their focus to Latin America, including Harold E. Wethey (1902–1984), professor of history of art at the University of Michigan from 1940 until his 1972 retirement. Wethey produced an early and important Andean history, Colonial Architecture and Sculpture of Peru in 1949 (New York Times 1984, B8; Wethey 1949). Large, state-supported museums dedicated to colonial art were not founded until the twentieth century, but foreign interest in the display and exhibition of Mexican objects dates back to the post-independence period after 1821 when early collectors from across Europe as well as North America traveled to “discover” Mexico. One early British enthusiast, William Bullock, returned to England to organize the country’s first exhibition of “Ancient and Modern Mexico,” held at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly in 1824 (Bullock 1824). In the US, systematic collecting dates to the 1930s, when the Denver Museum began acquiring colonial art (Cembalest 2010). The first survey exhibition of Latin American colonial art in the US took place in 2006, under the direction of curator Joseph Rishel at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Rishel and Stratton-Pruitt 2006). In Mexico, the first museums specifically devoted to viceregal art were founded in 1964, the Museo Nacional del Virreinato in Tepotzotlan and the Pinacoteca Virreinal de San Diego in Mexico City, the latter collection moving to the renovated Museo Nacional de Arte in 2000. The Museo de Arte in Lima, a major museum in South America, which includes colonial art, was founded in 1961. The Museo de Arte Colonial de Pedro de Osma in Lima, formerly a private collection, opened to the public as a museum in 1987.

Styles and nomenclature in colonial art and architecture Colonial art history has been the main locus for studies of colonial materiality in the twentieth century. Major concerns of early studies included preserving and documenting material objects as well as describing their unique stylistic traits. Some foundational scholars, such as Toussaint, followed by Hungarian-American Pál Kelemen (1894–1993), employed labels from European 310

Materialities and archives

art, resulting in Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo art in the Americas (Toussaint 1948; Kelemen 1951). Others proposed new labels to recognize the unique nature of viceregal cultural production, necessarily raising the question of indigenous artistic influences or survivals after the conquest, a topic discussed and debated to this day. The most frequently used style descriptive was a racial label, “mestizo,” meaning “of mixed race” (i.e., mixed indigenous and European). It was first used in the 1940s by art historians Angulo and Wethey to characterize the “mixed” style of colonial art (Angulo 1943; Wethey 1949; Black 2016). The term gained popularity among art historians attempting to distinguish colonial cultural production from that created in Spain (Kelemen 1951; Toussaint 1967). Spanish art historian José Moreno Villa (1887–1955), who fled to Mexico in 1936 due to Spain’s civil war, proposed the term “tequitqui” in 1941, Náhuatl for “one who pays tribute,” referring to artworks created by Native artists under Spanish domination (Moreno Villa 1941, 1949). The term was crafted in imitation of the Spanish style label “mudéjar,” from the Arabic word “mudajjan,” meaning “tamed” or “domesticated” (Moffit 1999, 64). It was a convenient classification to describe art created by Native artists under colonial rule, such as works produced under the direction of friars at missions. The carved decoration of outdoor chapels, called “posa” chapels, as at the Franciscan site of Calpan, Mexico, is typical.While the subject matter reflects Catholic iconographies, the execution of the imagery preserves indigenous sculptural technique (Figure 18.1). One of the earliest advocates for indigenous survival in the art of the Americas was Germanborn art historian Alfred Neumeyer (1901–1973), who published a pathbreaking article in 1948 in The Art Bulletin, the flagship journal of the College Art Association (Neumeyer 1948). Neumeyer, who earned his doctorate at the University of Berlin, was part of the wave of German-Jewish refugees fleeing Europe in the 1930s, leaving Germany in 1935 for Mills College in Oakland, California (New York Times 1973; Arts in Exile 2020). Neumeyer’s groundbreaking article, “The Indian Contribution to Architectural Decoration in Colonial America,” laid out an argument in favor of Native influence on colonial cultural production in both Mexico and Peru. In addition to the term “mestizo,” he also used terms such as “syncretic” and “admixture” to describe this art. He cautioned against comparing colonial art to Spanish, instead contextualizing it in relation to other analogous hybrid or “fringe” cultures. In his estimation, the art of the colonial Americas was similar to that produced in the Roman empire, Ireland, the outskirts of Europe, Asia, and Africa.To Neumeyer, colonial art was folk art, an art of the people, one that employed “mestizo,” or mixed style. He also proposed a method by which to identify the unique nature of colonial art: systematic comparison to European art, through which one could separate out stylistic particularities. (Neumeyer 1948, 109).While the challenges and inherent bias of this comparative method seem obvious today, Neumeyer’s approach fostered the identification of Native stylistic survivals, identified in sculpture and architectural ornament, including carved grooves, beveling, and incising; a preference for flatness; the valuation of negative space, an appreciation of abstraction, and visual complexity (Neumeyer 1948, 109–10). Neumeyer’s early promotion of Native survivals in colonial art did not immediately find support among other art historians. In fact, the next generation of scholars in this field took an opposing point of view, articulated by Yale professor Kubler, one of the first people to train specialists in the arts of the colonial Americas in the US. In a much-quoted essay from 1961, “On the Colonial Extinction of the Motifs of Pre-Columbian Art,” Kubler suggested that looking for indigenous influences or survival was like “a search for the fragments of a deep-lying shipwreck,” similar to performing an “autopsy” or “dissection of the corpse of a civilization” (Kubler 1961, 14–34). Whatever did manage to survive, he suggested, was absorbed into the dominant culture and emptied of meaning, in the process becoming a tool of oppression (Kubler 1961, 15). 311

Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez

Figure 18.1  Posa Chapel, Franciscan convent, founded 1548, Calpan, Puebla, Mexico. Photo credit: Gianni Dagli Orti/The Art Archive of Art Resource, NY; reproduced by permission.

Notably, Kubler opposed the use of the popular style label “mestizo,” pointing to its “burden of racial meaning,” preferring “tequitqui” in the case of Mexico or the designation of “folk art” (Kubler 1961, 17). Did the “mestizo” label carry with it an historical residue of adverse colonial stereotypes? First used to describe people of mixed race in the Americas beginning around 1550, the term carried a negative connotation throughout the colonial period (Forbes 1993). Did it influence how colonial cultural production was viewed? Kubler proposed other terms (as noted above), as well as “Indo-Hispanic.” Mexican researcher Constantino Valerio Reyes (1922–2006) suggested “indocristiano” or “Indo-Christian” (Reyes-Valerio 1978). Scholars working on Andean art also created new labels to describe a parallel stylistic mixture, including “ibero-andino,” “indo-peruano,” “Hispano-indio,” and “criollo” (Mújica Pinilla 2016). 312

Materialities and archives

Not all art historians agreed with Kubler. Some argued that the use of the term “mestizo” was an early attempt to recognize the unique qualities of Mexican art. For example, the eminent Toussaint used it to refer to the “fusion” of Spanish and Indian, perhaps a precursor of such words as “hybrid” to describe colonial cultural production. The author John McAndrew, in his comprehensive study of sixteenth-century architecture in Mexico, used the term “mestizo” in a similar manner (McAndrew 1965, 196–201). The label was still in common use among art historians in the late twentieth century. The ascendance of a related classification, that of “tequitqui,” accompanied the rise of “mestizo” to prominence. First proposed by Moreno Villa in 1941, he employed the term “tequitqui” to describe carved atrial crosses that preserved indigenous style. Mexican scholars, in particular, have used the term “tequitqui” in an attempt to recognize the continued vitality of indigenous artistic traditions after the conquest (Aguilar-Moreno 2005). Others, though, characterize “tequitqui” art in demeaning tones, describing it as unoriginal, awkward, and stylized, albeit delightful or charming (Wilder Weismann 1956b, 70; Early 2001, 33, 120). Such value judgments suggest that Mexico’s indigenous artists were visually less literate than European ones. Arguably, such scholarship also promotes a vision of the Spanish conquest as total and complete, leaving little room for indigenous agency, resistance, or new colonial creation. It is significant that the first scholars to propose “mestizo” as a stylistic descriptive were Wethey and Angulo, who, as primarily Hispanists, were familiar with a similar dilemma in Spanish art, that of a syncretic artistic tradition influenced by multiple outside sources. Indeed, Spanish art does not fit easily into pre-established categories for European art. A preoccupation with stylistic labeling continued to be a major concern in studies of Spanish art even into the 1980s and 1990s. Several leading Hispanists, from Jonathan Brown and Alfonso Pérez Sánchez to the semiotician Victor Stoichita, have remarked upon the “eclectic,” “unoriginal” nature of Spanish art. Svetlana Alpers, in her 1985 article on Las Meninas, proposed that Spanish art could be defined by its unresolved, unsettling combination of the two conflicting modes of Italian and Dutch representation (Alpers 1983, 31–42; Brown 1992, 1999; Pérez Sánchez 1992; Stoichita 1995, 7–9). A corollary to this idea of Spanish art as “eclectic” was an assumption of its inferiority in comparison to Italian and French art (Brown 1991, 149). Because Spanish art was difficult to categorize or seemed eclectic, it was therefore considered to be provincial, derivative, and inferior. The prevailing view of Spanish art as a provincial stylistic mishmash easily transferred across the Atlantic, to be applied readily to colonial cultural production, now mixed additionally with indigenous visual traits. Kubler, in fact, described colonial art as “provincial” (Bailey, Phillips, and Voigt 2009, 9). These two opposing art historical positions—one advocating for indigenous survival and the other convinced of its destruction by European conquest—structured much early scholarship on colonial art. Historians were the first to document that indigenous cultures did not disappear with European colonization, as noted by Klein (2002, 134, citing Gibson 1964; Adorno 1979, 1986; Lockhart 1992, 1993). Early studies of colonial manuscripts bridged the fields of preColumbian and colonial art history (Robertson 1956, 1959; Bailey Waddell, 1972; Boone 1983, 1989). A number of Klein’s own art history graduate students at UCLA, initially trained as preColumbianists, began to uncover and document the extent of indigenous survivals in the colonial period. Important early studies of manuscripts, paintings, maps, and kero cups, among other works, clearly demonstrated the extent of Native survivals in colonial art throughout the Americas (Bailey Waddell 1972; Peterson 1985, 1993; Cummins 1988, 2002; Dean 1990, 1993; Leibsohn 1993, 2009; Cortez 1996, 2002; Boone and Cummins 1998; Boone 2000). Jeanette Favrot Peterson’s 1993 book on the Malinalco frescoes suggested that despite their status as “subject peoples,” indigenous artists painted covert subversive codes in Catholic mission art. In a 313

Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez

postmodern twist, Thomas B. F. Cummins posited that we see Native presence in the seeming absence of obvious influences in South American architecture, and specifically in the context of Cuzco’s main plaza (Cummins 1996). Dana Leibsohn noted the multi-dialectical nature of colonial pictorial languages in maps in sixteenth-century Mexico (Leibsohn 1996). AtYale University, Barbara Mundy filed her dissertation investigating indigenous maps in sixteenth-century New Spain, the first comprehensive study of the subject, later published as a book (Mundy 1993, 1996).1 Significantly, none of these scholars felt it necessary to marshal racialized language in their work (Dean and Leibsohn 2003). Furthermore, and in opposition to the idea articulated in Kubler’s 1961 article that likened indigenous culture to “a deep-lying shipwreck,” this new scholarship sought to rejoin, not separate, the study of colonial and pre-Columbian material cultures (Klein 2002, 134). As a result of this new research, created under the influence of postcolonialism, a scholarly and philosophical movement that sought to recognize the aftereffects of colonialism (Hall 1996; see Maldonado-Torres in this volume), scholars pursued new terms to describe this unique artistic production. The term “syncretic,” originating in religious studies, and first used in art history by Neumeyer in 1948, became popular (Arroyo 2016, 140–1). Other scholars attempted to understand colonial art through concepts such as acculturation or transculturation, the former encoding assimilationist discourse and the latter highlighting cultural encounter as exchange (Arroyo 2016, 133–44). Inspired by postcolonial theorists such as James Clifford, who stressed the complexity of all cultural production, the term “hybrid” became fashionable. His counsel that it is impossible to identify any pure “Indian-ness” after the point of cultural contact warned scholars of the dangers of romantic longings for “authentic” Native cultures (Clifford 1988). Others attempted to understand these works through concepts such as Homi Bhabha’s third space or mimicry (Bhabha 1994), in an attempt to move past the assimilationist subtext of previous terms, including “hybrid,” which seemed to valorize Europeanness (Katzew 2011). Instead of considering art made by indigenous makers during the colonial period as poor imitations of European models, some art historians began to consider the possibility of camouflage or new artistic inventions (Peterson 1993; Afanador-Pujol 2010, 293–307). By about 2000, the term “hybrid” had emerged as a favorite. The prize-winning article “Hybridity and Its Discontents,” authored by influential art historians Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, critically assessed the usage of the term (2003). They suggested that the type of cultural differences art historians are attuned to mattered little to colonial beholders. In fact, there is little in the historical or archival record to suggest that colonial beholders were preoccupied with deciphering indigenous, European, and/or Asian differences in artistic or cultural objects. Finally, Dean and Leibsohn pointed to gaps in art historians’ usage of the term. What about “invisible hybridity,” for example, when Native labor was used to construct a building but no visible trace of that remains? Additionally, they suggested that current usage of “hybridity” by art historians seems to reify differences between European and indigenous visual cultures. Their critique zeroes in on how scholars have long searched for an essentialized “Indian-ness” to distinguish viceregal cultural production from Spanish art forms. More recently, the search has begun for identifiable traces of Asian and African influences. A fascinating example demonstrates the risks of this approach, namely, the art historical study of the painter Juan Gerson, artist of the ceiling decoration in Tecamachalco, Mexico. Initially, scholars were misled by the artist’s last name, thinking he was of Flemish descent. Not surprisingly, they detected the influence of Flemish prints on his paintings. When someone uncovered archival documents suggesting that the artist was indigenous, suddenly, art historians began to observe the survival of pre-Columbian pictorial conventions (Camela Arredondo et al. 1964; Landa Abrego 1992; Dean and Leibsohn 2003, 22) (Figure 18.2). 314

Materialities and archives

Figure 18.2  Juan Gerson (sixteenth century), Scenes from the Old and New Testament. Paintings by Native artist, after 1562. Church and Franciscan monastery, founded in 1541. Tecamachalco, Puebla, Mexico. © Giles Mermet/Art Resource, NY; reproduced by permission.

This search for an essentialized Indianness finds inspiration in studies of Spanish art, where scholars have long been engaged in defining “Spanishness.” The practice is perfectly expressed by Oskar Hagen, in his Patterns and Principles of Spanish Art, published in the 1940s (Hagen 1948). His introduction maintains that: “The art of every nation is as thoroughly impregnated with racial elements of expression as is its language. … the sum total of these racial elements, whether they are encountered in the language or in the art of a nation, discloses an underlying nationalpsychological disposition … ” (Hagen 1948, 4). The remainder of his book endeavors to define the elusive Spanishness of Spanish art. Raced discourses, of course, are not unique to the study of viceregal or Spanish art, and were a prominent feature of the field of art history at its foundation, as analysis of Heinrich Wölfflin’s 1915 Principles of Art History demonstrates. Wölfflin’s treatise on Renaissance and Baroque art attributed European stylistic differences to the “peculiarities of national imagination,” present in 315

Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez

“the very blood” of its citizens” (Wölfflin 1950, 106).These differences were part of seeing itself, as “the modes of vision are refracted by nationality” (Wölfflin 1950, 235). Thus, according to Wölfflin, stylistic variation results from inherent, essential, biological differences between the “races.” Not surprisingly, throughout the twentieth century and even today in the twenty-first, discussions of artistic style have often been bound up with essentializing notions of race. Take the example of Latin American and Latinx art, frequently described as colorful, emotional, political, and exuberant, traits that align with racial stereotypes (Black 2019a, 6). The connections between the historiographies of Spanish and Latin American colonial art have escaped serious commentary, partly because of the disciplinary separation in the study of Spain and the Americas. Colonial art provides a revealing historiographic case study because it exists both inside and outside of the imagined boundaries of the “mother country.” Challenging the traditional division between Europe and the “New World” provides one fruitful avenue for future research (Black 2006). As postcolonial theorists have correctly insisted, colonialism did not just occur in the colonies but also in the colonizing country. Scholars are looking beyond the Native/European binary, though, to transatlantic and transpacific exchanges, considering the influence of Asian and African arts and cultures in the Americas (Bailey, Phillips, and Voigt 2009, 15).The newest research, as exemplified by recent work on the eighteenth century, situates colonial painting in the Americas within both global and regional contexts (Katzew 2017). Finally, the debate over terminology has not been resolved. In the words of specialist Gauvin Bailey, “scholars have increasingly acknowledged the difficulty of applying simple words like mestizo or hybrid – although we have yet to come up with better terms …” (Bailey, Phillips, and Voigt 2009, 15). New developments in decolonial studies offer potentially fruitful paths, innovative avenues of politically engaged scholarship that imagine a radical new future (Cohen-Aponte 2017). Decolonial approaches challenge Eurocentrism, and Eurocentric notions of universality; they make visible Michel Foucault’s history of power as they perform what Walter Mignolo has called “epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo 2011, 122–23; Maldonado-Torres 2016 and in this volume). Decolonial approaches also have a strong activist arm, rooted in indigenous rights movements, in contrast to postcolonialism, which arguably primarily occurred in the academy (Smith 1999). Mignolo’s call for “epistemic disobedience,” elaborated from postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak’s “epistemic violence” (Spivak [1988] 2010) is particularly useful in the face of so-called universality, helpful to unsettle art historical assumptions that some art is of higher quality than other, or that scholars should respect national and chronological boundaries. It encourages an approach to art history that dares to inquire into art history’s history, its discourses, its hidden biases and agendas. A decolonizing approach to colonial art has the power to transform not just the academy, but everyday lives.

The material turn and enconchados: a case study During the recent “material turn” in the humanities of the 1990s and 2000s, scholars renewed their attention to material objects and their actual physical make up or materiality.The “material turn” was characterized as a reaction to digitalization by some. Bill Brown, known for his development of  “thing theory” in the late 1990s and early 2000s, suggested that an interest in things was also a reaction against “theory.” He wisely warned, however, “Taking the side of things hardly puts a stop to that thing called theory” (Brown 2001, 3; Miller 2005, 1–50; Rosler et al. 2013, 34, 15, 19). Developments in the new field of “technical art history,” research based on collaborative and interdisciplinary work among art historians, conservation scientists, and museum curators, also 316

Materialities and archives

fostered an interest in materiality, understood to mean the study of the materials of artworks, identified by scientific techniques. In actuality, such work dates back to the 1920s. Edward Forbes, at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum, founded the first program in technical studies in 1928—the Department for Conservation and Technical Research, known since 1994 as the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies. Interdisciplinary research began to develop more rapidly in the wake of such scientific advances as infrared reflectography in the 1970s and dendochronology in the 1980s. In 1972, the National Gallery in London began publishing the National Gallery Technical Bulletin, featuring interdisciplinary, collaborative work. These new interdisciplinary collaborations, and in particular those of technical art history, moved materiality studies forward. Materials can reveal considerable information about the conditions that surrounded an object’s creation—trade, economics, and technology. How can art historians, historians, and other scholars use this new technical knowledge to study the availability, selection, transport, and creation of these newly identified materials? What can these materials tell us about how artworks were created or how they produced meaning? What can we learn about the access to, and distribution of, both materials and the resulting artworks? We test these questions, as well as the challenges posed by the unique objects created in the colonial Americas, in a brief case study of enconchados, unusual, hybrid, multimedia artworks created in New Spain (Mexico) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Colonial enconchado paintings, hybrid objects that combine iridescent shell inlay with oil painting on wood panel, illustrate the complexity of cultural genesis in the colonial Americas as well as the benefits and limits of academic approaches to materiality.2 To date, art historians have identified several hundred surviving examples from New Spain, or Mexico. Archival documents identify names of some artists, most notably, members of the González family, as well as patrons, including the viceroy, high-ranking creoles, and other elites. A number of important enconchados were acquired by the Spanish court, including the 24 panel Conquest series possibly created for King Carlos II (Madrid, Museo de América) (Ocaña Ruiz 2013, 129). Today, enconchados are mostly found outside of Mexico, in European churches and collections in US museums. Much about these artworks has baffled art historians—their origins, influences, and style. Scholarship to date has concentrated on tracing the varied artistic influences at play in enconchados. Scholars have focused on the Asian roots of the Mexican enconchado technique of shell inlay. Originating in China during the Song period (960–1127), mother-of-pearl inlay then spread to Thailand, India, Japan, and Korea. An example from China—a sumptuous twelve-panel screen, Spring Morning in the Han Palace, which dates from between 1662 and 1722 (Figure 18.3), roughly contemporaneous with the Mexican enconchados—can be considered representative of the technique. Constructed from wood, the screen is covered with black lacquer and embellished with mother-of-pearl mosaic, crushed shell, and gold foil inlay (Leidy 2006, 9–50, especially 40–41). The artist or artists used iridescent shell to create all parts of the scene represented—figures, architecture, and landscape elements. Art historians have additionally noted very close and important links to Nanban objects, Japanese export ware imported to New Spain via the Manila galleon, then often shipped to Europe (Armella de Aspe et al. 1990, 12; Castelló Yturbide 1990, 140–2; Rivero Lake and Vallarino 1997, 246; Rivero Lake 2005). Singling out Japanese influence on Mexican enconchados makes sense, given Spanish attempts to missionize, colonize, and conduct trade in Japan in the early modern period (Bailey 2006, 57–69; Miyata Rodríguez 2009; Sanabrais 2009a, b). Works in the style of “Nanban,” which translates as “southern barbarians,” referring to Europeans, and specifically to the Portuguese and Spaniards, reflect a combination of European and Asian artistic influences. Intended for use by missionaries or to be traded, typical Nanban 317

Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez

Figure 18.3  W  omen in the Palace, detail from Spring Morning in the Han Palace, Qing dynasty, Kangxi period (between 1662 and 1722), 9 ft 4 5/8 × 24 ft 8 1/16 in. (286.1 × 752 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, purchase, The Vincent Astor Foundation Gift, 2001.

works are made of lacquered wood, and include liturgical objects such as lecterns, portable altars, furniture, and other decorative arts. Building upon the idea that Nanban art was the major artistic source of inspiration for enconchados, recent research by Mexican art historian Sonia Ocaña Ruiz draws on the material evidence of the artworks themselves, and in particular, their frames. The floral decoration of enconchado frames is strikingly similar to Nanban art (Ocaña Ruiz 2009, 129). These similarities notwithstanding, the major scenes themselves depart significantly from Japanese Nanban or other Asian models, due to the privileging of both iridescence and reality effects. The unique representational strategies devised by enconchado artists can be seen in examples created by Miguel and Juan González, the best-known masters of the genre, including panels from the Conquest series, one of the best known and most closely studied sets of enconchados, as well as an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the most common sacred subject represented by enconchado artists (Armella de Aspe et al. 1990, 82) (Figures 18.4 and 18.5). These works, like most other enconchados, selectively employ the mosaic technique. Dated to around 1698 and signed by Miguel González, the Virgin of Guadalupe (Figure 18.4) (Katzew 2010) is framed by the standard four Guadalupan apparitions. The dove of the Holy Spirit appears above Mary’s luminescent figure, balanced below by the symbol of the founding of  Tenochtitlan, an eagle on a cactus.This enconchado preserves its original frame, decorated with symbols of the Immaculate Conception. In the main image, shell mosaic is used selectively to render draperies, feathers, and architectural elements, typical of Mexican enconchado artists. Similarly, in a panel from the Conquest series, dated 1698 and signed by both Juan and 318

Materialities and archives

Figure 18.4  M  iguel González, Virgin of Guadalupe, circa 1698, oil on canvas on wood with mother-ofpearl inlay (enconchado), 49 × 37 in. (124.46 × 95.25 cm). Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles.

Miguel González (Vargaslugo 1994), shell is selectively employed to characterize the shiny armor of the Spanish and Aztec soldiers (Figure 18.5). Nanban and other Asian art seem to have been one source of inspiration for the enconchados but the selective use of shell mosaic is different from the use of shell either only on frames or consistently employed throughout the composition. Instead, viceregal Mexican artists selectively used shell for strategic ends. In contrast to possible artistic sources of inspiration, shell is almost never used for figures’ faces or bodies in enconchados, but most frequently for drapery, and also to replicate metal, stone, flower petals, or feathers, as in the case of depictions of armor, architecture, roses, or angels’ wings. In other words, in New Spain shell tended to be used to 319

Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez

Figure 18.5  M  iguel González and Juan González, Conquest Battle Scene, detail from The Conquest of Mexico, 1698, oil on canvas with cardboard and mother-of-pearl (enconchado), 80 4/5 × 48 in. (205 × 121 cm). Museo de América, Madrid. Album/Art Resource, NY.

320

Materialities and archives

replicate potentially shiny, iridescent materials. Thus, the use of mother of pearl is not solely decorative, as in many of the Japanese Nanban works or other potential sources. This is a major innovation by New Spanish artists. Furthermore, the color of the shell varies considerably in Mexican enconchados, in contrast to most Asian examples of shellwork, the latter privileging either luminous white pearl shell or naturally occurring iridescent pinks and greens. Mexican enconchados demonstrate a greater variety of colors, due to the use of varying shells, but also to the application of oil glazes and varnishes brushed over the mosaics. As a result, the shell inlay helps further the creation of reality effects. Asian art may not be the only influence at play here. Other sources for the use of shell may also be pertinent. Shell mosaic has been used around the world from time immemorial to create aesthetically pleasing objects. Enconchados may also be linked to shellwork in the indigenous Americas and to Islamic-influenced and Indo-Portuguese artworks as well as European sources. In the case of Mexican enconchados, the source of the shell was Mexico itself, specifically the Pacific coast of Baja California, according to period sources, and possibly also the coast near Oaxaca. Both were important pearl fishing areas. Shells, the discarded by-product of the search for pearls, began to be sold to supplement income from the pearl fisheries in Mexico as early as the seventeenth century (Black 2019b). The shell used in enconchado paintings derives from Pinctada mazatlanica, also called La Paz pearl oyster, which is found in the eastern Pacific from Baja California to Peru (Armella de Aspe et al. 1990, 22, 24; Landman and Mikkelson 2001, 32–33). In the case of enconchados, the prevalence of shell mosaic around the world and throughout history, the scope of world trade, and the early modern movement of peoples and objects around the globe render traditional comparative strategies of visual analysis inadequate to establish a secure or convincing visual or chronological genealogy. Enconchados are thus both powerfully global and profoundly local. They offer a fruitful case study precisely because of these complexities. The challenges of researching enconchados are similar to those presented in a recent study of an altar cloth from San Miguel Tzinacantepec, Mexico, dating from the seventeenth or eighteenth century (Tepotzotlan,Viceregal Museum) (Russo 2014, 1–15). Similar to the multimedia composite structure of enconchados, this cotton altar cloth combines various artistic traditions and contains a perplexing array of iconography and decorative elements crafted from feathers. Its style, iconography, and even its date have challenged art historians’ attempts to unlock its secrets. Is it indigenous, or derived from European popular art? Russo’s suggestion of “untranslatable” as a label to categorize such objects seems apropos. Influenced by Aby Warburg’s theorization of “difficult objects,” Russo borrowed the term from French philosopher and philologist Barbara Cassin, who writes, “to speak of untranslatable does not signify that these terms … are not or cannot be translated—the untranslatable is rather what one never stops (not) translating” (Cassin 2004, xvii;  Warburg 2004 [1923], 293–330; Russo 2014, 6). Russo proposes this new qualifier, “untranslatable,” as a corrective to the current vocabularies used for colonial art, which she rightly deems inadequate (Russo 2014, 6). Can a focus on the materiality of enconchados, on their shiny amalgamated surfaces, created from shell, oil pigments, and colored varnishes, help us move beyond the impasse of untranslatability? Indeed, their iridescent surfaces inspire us to rethink art historians’ quests for ultimate visual precedents, neatly articulated genealogies, and definitive artistic sources. Instead, what can a focus on surfaces tell us about such early modern artifacts? Can they help propose a new way to think about early modern art and globalization? It seems impossible to completely identify the complex network of sources that inspired the creation of Mexican enconchados. No art historical language seems to exist to explain the genesis 321

Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez

of these objects. Like Russo’s altar cloth, the origins of these artworks can be situated in multiple locales and temporalities; such works demonstrate that it is impossible at times to use style to trace an object’s origins. Furthermore, to describe enconchados as “hybrid” seems inappropriate if we retain the term’s original political sense of describing objects that employ visual tactics to oppose colonization, that is, strategies of indigenous agency (Dean and Leibsohn 2003, 5, 7–9, 13–15). The current use of “hybrid,” focused on indigenous-European mixtures, also skirts the complexity of the potential sources here. The complexity of the genesis of enconchados, and the challenge of explaining their creation, led us to Gilles Deleuze’s The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, which employs the great mathematician Leibniz’s theories of folds, pleats, curves, twisting surfaces, curvature, and movement as a model for thinking about the world (1993). Folds, pleats, and curves represent ideas that cannot be pinned down, that do not constitute straight lines, concepts that muddle separation—analogs to the enconchado paintings. Such an approach, one could argue, also exerts its interpretive energies on the surface, eschewing the “depth” of traditional art history, by which we mean attempts to pinpoint sources, or identify artists’ intent. Instead of attempting to isolate “sources” for the enconchados or identify the ethnicity of the artists, this chapter has chosen to focus on the enconchados’ surfaces of iridescent shell, their scintillating reflections and glinting highlights. Embracing a different viewpoint—the surface—allows us to relinquish the impulse to identify cause, intent, or origin. The fabrication of enconchados in New Spain—with so many potential sources of inspiration, so many layers—shows how the early modern world was folded; how all was folds, unfolds, and refolds; how the whole world was connected; how time and space can become compressed. Enconchados, then, have the potential to deterritorialize art history, to shrink the early modern world. As such, they provide a new model for thinking about what has been called globalism before globalization, to paraphrase a roundtable discussion convened by the journal October in 2010 (Yiengpruksawan et al. 2010).

Concluding thoughts: colonial archives The “archival turn” of the 1990s inspired critical inquiry into what constitutes an “archive” (Simon 2002, 102). Despite the fact that when one thinks of “archives,” official documents guarded in government buildings come to mind, various collections, objects, and practices can comprise an archive. Protests, performances, and other events constitute alternative archives (Taylor 2003). Material objects, which leave tangible traces of the past, function as an archive, acting as primary data or even constituting “surviving historical events” (Prown 1982, 3). The best-known archives utilized by scholars working on the colonial Americas are those compiled and created by the colonizers. Indigenous archives, on the other hand, while including written documents and material objects, also include ancestral knowledge passed down orally and through embodied actions; they present a differing point of view (Smith 1999;Terraciano 2010). In the face of assumptions about the truth value of documents or archives, Michel Foucault (1925–1984) reminds us that “discourse has not only a meaning or truth, but a history.” (Foucault 1972 [1969], 125). An archive represents “the law of what can be said,” that which defines enunciability, that which we regard as knowledge. Scholarship benefits from attempts to glimpse its structure, origin, and biases (Foucault 1972 [1969], 125–29). As an alternative to the flawed notion of positivism, and its suppositions of objective truth, Foucault offered “positivity,” or what he called the “historical a priori” (Foucault 1972 [1969], 125–29). What is possible to regard as documentation, knowledge, or facts given the borders of a particular episteme or definition of truth? 322

Materialities and archives

A new study of the Archivo General de Indias (Seville, Spain), the major archive for the early Americas, has linked its creation to the invention of the idea of  “Latin America” in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Archive of the Indies was created by dismembering already existing archives in Spain, a process that helped separate Spain from the Americas in the political imagination. Thus, its creation coincided with the emergence of the notion of coloniality (Hamann 2018). Similarly, Cecelia F. Klein has documented the partitioning of the fields of pre-Columbian and colonial art history by surveying publications on Mexico since the sixteenth century, twentieth-century museum exhibitions, and course offerings at US universities. Before the mid-nineteenth century, texts written on Mexico’s past did not separate the ancient from the colonial world, instead joining the two together in historical continuum (Klein 2002, 131).The terms “pre-Columbian, pre-Hispanic, and colonial” did not appear until the mid-nineteenth century (Klein 2002, 132).This nomenclature was firmly in place in academe by the 1960s. She interprets the move “as a largely conservative, if not reactionary, political strategy that has fostered an historical impression of pre-Columbian peoples as culturally uniform and static” (Klein 2002, 131). Klein has further argued that the two time periods were separated in order to cast colonial as “pre-Modern” and Western (Klein 2002, 133–34). Similarly, Néstor García Canclini has demonstrated the linkage between the indigenous and the “folk,” or “the people” (el pueblo) in nineteenth-century Mexico. The staging of this notion of  “the people” as a group “fatally rooted in tradition,” was central to the emergence of nationalism in nineteenthand twentieth-century Mexico (García Canclini 1995, 145). In line with Foucault, Klein reminds us of the difficulties of describing our own archive, because we are conditioned by its rules (Klein, 2002, 130). But for all the difficulties and challenges of scholarship, and for all the problems in studying archives or materiality, documents, objects, or practices, investigating the past is a valuable endeavor. Knowledge of history can help us in the contemporary moment, by providing strategies to combat current and future challenges. Which histories are authorized and who is empowered to narrate them?

Notes 1 Other dissertations on colonial art defended before the 1990s at Yale include Barbara Anderson (1973); Thomas Reese (1974); and Humberto Rodríguez-Camilloni (1981); all cited in Completed Dissertations– Yale University Department of the History of Art. Because these were not primarily concerned with indigenous survivals in colonial art, they are not discussed in the text. 2 This section is drawn from conference papers I have given on enconchados in Zurich, University of Zurich (2012); Mexico City, Franz Mayer Museum (2013); the Getty Research Institute (2014); and UC Riverside (2014). See Villaseñor Black (2019b).

Works cited Adorno, Rolena. 1979. “Paradigms Lost: A Peruvian Indian Surveys Spanish Colonial Society.” Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 5 (2): 78–79. ———. 1986. Guaman Poma:Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru. Austin: University of Texas Press. Afanador-Pujol, Angélica J. 2010. “The Tree of Jesse and the Relación de Michoacán: Mimicry and Identity in Colonial Mexico.” Art Bulletin 92 (4): 293–307. Aguilar-Moreno, Manuel. 2005. Utopía de piedra: el arte tequitqui de México. Guadalajara, MX: Conexión Gráfica. Alpers, Svetlana. 1983. “Interpretation without Representation, or the Viewing of Las Meninas.” Representations 1 (1): 30–42. Angulo, Diego. 1943. Historia del arte hispanoamericano. Buenos Aires: Salvat. Armella de Aspe,Virginia 1990. La concha nácar en México. Mexico City: Gutsa.

323

Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez Arroyo, Jossianna. 2016. “Transculturation, Syncretism, and Hybridity.” In Martínez-San Miguel et al., 133–144. Arts in Exile. “Alfred Neumeyer.” http://kuenste-im-exil.de/KIE/Content/EN/Persons/neumeyeralfred-en.html Bailey, Gauvin Alexander. 2006. “Asia in the Arts of Colonial Latin America.” In The Arts in Latin America 1492–1820, edited by Joseph Rishel and Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt, 57–69. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Bailey, Gauvin Alexander, Carla Rahn Phillips, and Lisa Voigt. 2009. “Spain and Spanish America in the Early Modern Atlantic World: Current Trends in Scholarship.” Renaissance Quarterly 62 (1): 1–60. Bailey Waddell, Joyce. 1972. “Map of Texúpa (Oaxaca, 1579): A Study of Form and Meaning.” The Art Bulletin 54 (4): 452–472. ———. 1978. “The Study of Latin American Art History in the United States: The Past 40 Years.” Research Center for the Arts Review 1 (2): 1–3. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge. Black, Charlene Villaseñor. 2006. Creating the Cult of St. Joseph: Art and Gender in the Spanish Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2016. “Race and the Historiography of Colonial Art.” In Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America, edited by Pamela A. Patton, 303–322. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2019a. “Thoughts from Nepantla.” Latin American and Latinx Visual Culture 1 (2): 3–7. ———. 2019b “The Iridescent Enconchado.” In Iberian Empire and the Roots of Globalization, edited by Ivonne del Valle, Anna More, and Rachel Sarah O’Toole, 233–269. Hispanic Issues 44. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press. Boone, Elizabeth Hill. 1979. “U.S. Universities and Latin American Art History.” Research Center for the Arts Review 2 (3): 2–3. ———. 1983. The Codex Magliabechiano and the Lost Prototype of the Magliabechiano Group. Los Angeles and Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 1989. Incarnations of the Aztec Supernatural:The Image of Huitzilopochtli in Mexico and Europe. Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 79 (pt. 2): i–107. ———. 2000. Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztec and Mixtec. Austin: University of Texas Press. Boone, Elizabeth Hill, and Tom Cummins, eds. 1998. Native Traditions in the Postconquest World. A Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks, 2nd through 4th October 1992. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Brown, Bill. 2001. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28 (1): 1–22. Brown, Jonathan. 1991. “Another Image of the World: Spanish Art, 1500–1920.” In The Spanish World: Civilization and Empire, Europe and the Americas, Past and Present, edited by J. H. Elliott and A. MacKay, 149–184. New York: Harry N. Abrams. ———. 1992. Golden Age of Painting in Spain New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. ———. 1999. Painting in Spain, 1500–1700. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Bullock, William. 1824. Catalogue of the Exhibition, called Modern Mexico: Containing a Panoramic View of the City, with Specimens of the Natural History of New Spain … at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly. London: Printed for the proprietor. Calvo Serraller, Francisco. 1986. “Necrológicas: Diego Angulo Íñiguez, catedrático e historiador del Arte.” El País, October 6, 1986. Camela Arredondo, Rosa de Lourdes, Jorge Gurría Lacroix, and Constantino Reyes Valerio. 1964. Juan Gersón: tlacuilo de Tecamachalco. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Cassin, Barbara, ed. 2004. Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles. Paris: Le Seuil. Castelló Yturbide, Teresa. 1990. “Los artesanos artistisas.” La concha nácar en México, edited by Virginia Armella de Aspe et al. Mexico City : Gutsa, 137-181. Cembalest, Robin. 2010. “The Colonial Revolution.” ARTnews 109 (4): 78–85. Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture:Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cohen-Aponte, Ananda. 2017. “Decolonizing the Global Renaissance: A View from the Andes.” In The Globalization of Renaissance Art: A Critical Review, edited by David Savoy, 67–94. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Completed Dissertations. 2018. Completed Dissertations—Yale University Department of the History of Art: 1942 to Present. https://arthistory.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/FORM013%20-%20Dissertations%20 Completed%20to%202018(1).pdf.

324

Materialities and archives Cortez, Constance. 1996. “Gaspar Antonio Chi and the Xiu Family Tree.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. ———. 2002. “New Dance, Old Xius:The Xiu Family Tree and Maya Cultural Continuity after European Contact.” In Heart of Creation: the Mesoamerican World and the Legacy of Linda Schele, edited by Andrea Stone, 201–215. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Cummins,Thomas B.F. 1988. “Abstraction to Narration: Kero Imagery of Peru and the Colonial Alteration of Native Identity.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. ——— 1996. “A Tale of Two Cities: Cuzco, Lima, and the Construction of Colonial Representation.” In Converging Cultures: Art & Identity in Spanish America, edited by Diana Fane, 157–170. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Exhibition catalog. ——— 2002. Toasts with the Inca: Andean Abstraction and Colonial Images on Quero Vessels. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Dean, Carolyn. 1990. “Painted Images of Cuzco’s Corpus Christi: Social Conflict and Cultural Strategy in Viceregal Peru.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. ———. 1993. “Ethnic Conflict and Corpus Christi in Colonial Cuzco.” Colonial Latin American Review 2 (1–2): 93–120. Dean, Carolyn, and Dana Leibsohn. 2003. “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America.” Colonial Latin American Review 12 (1): 5–35. Deleuze, Gilles. 1993. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Early, James. 2001. The Colonial Architecture of Mexico. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press. Forbes, Jack. 1993. Africans and Native Americans:The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Foucault, Michel. [1969] 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. García Canclini, Néstor. [1995] 2005. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity.Translated by Christopher R. Chiappari and Silvia L. Lopez. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Garrigan, Shelley E. 2012. Collecting Mexico: Museums, Monuments, and the Creation of National Identity. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Gibson, Charles. 1964. The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519– 1810. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hagen, Oskar. 1948. Patterns and Principles of Spanish Art. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Hall, Stuart. 1996. “When Was the ‘Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit.” In The Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, edited by Iain Chambers and Lidia Curtis, 242–260. London and New York: Routledge. Hamann, Byron. 2018. The Invention of Colonial America: Data, Architecture, and the Archive of the Indies (1781– 1844). Unpublished book MS under publication review. Forthcoming 2021, Getty Publications. Herrera, Olga U., and María C. Gaztambide. 2017. “En Diálogo: Contemporary Latin American and Latino Art.” Diálogo 20 (1): 3–8. Howerton & Bryan Funeral Home. 2011. Durham, ND. “Sidney David Markman, PhD 1911–2011. Obituary.” http://durhamhebrewcemetery.org/details.php?id=636 Katzew, Ilona. 2010. “The Virgin of Guadalupe/Virgen de Guadalupe.” Curatorial note displayed with Miguel González’s The Virgin of Guadalupe (Virgen de Guadalupe). Latin American Art Collection, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA. https://collections.lacma.org/node/222405. ———. 2011. Contested Visions in the Spanish Colonial World. Exhibition catalog. New Haven. CT: Yale University Press. Katzew, Ilona, ed. 2017. Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790. Pinxit Mexici. Exhibition catalog. New York: DelMonico Books/Prestel. Kelemen, Pál. 1951. Baroque and Rococo in Latin America. New York: Macmillan. Klein, Cecelia F. 2002. “Not Like Us and All the Same: Pre-Columbian Art History and the Construction of the Nonwest.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 42, no. 1: 131–138. Krieger, Peter. 2009. “Las primeras dos décadas de los Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas: la era de Manuel Toussaint.” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 31 (95): 173–180. Kubler, George. 1961. “On the Colonial Extinction of the Motifs of Pre-Columbian Art.” In Essays in PreColumbian Art and Archaeology, edited by S. K. Lothrop et al., 14–34. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Landa Abrego, María Elena. 1992. Juan Gerson, tlacuilo. Mexico City: Gobierno del Estado de Puebla.

325

Charlene Villaseñor Black and Mari-Tere Álvarez Landman, Neil H., and Paula Mikkelson. 2001. Pearls: A Natural History. New York: Harry N. Abrams and the American Museum of Natural History. Leibsohn, Dana. 1993. “The ‘Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca’: Recollecting Identity in a Nahua Manuscript.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles. ———. 1996. “Mapping Metaphors: Figuring the Ground of Sixteenth-Century New Spain.” The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 26 (3): 497–523. ———. 2009. Script and Glyph: Pre-Hispanic History, Colonial Bookmaking and the Historia tolteca-chichimeca. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. Leibsohn, Dana, and Carolyn Dean. 2003. “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish America.” Colonial Latin American Review 12 (1): 5–35. Leidy, Denise Patry. 2006. Mother-of-Pearl: A Tradition in Asian Lacquer. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Lockhart, James. 1992. The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 1993. We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico. Berkeley: University of California Press. McAndrew, John. 1965. The Open-Air Churches of Sixteenth-Century Mexico: Atrios, Posas, Open Chapels, and Other Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2016. “Colonialism, Neocolonial, Internal Colonialism, the Postcolonial, Coloniality, and Decoloniality.” In Martínez-San Miguel et al., 67–78 Martínez-San Miguel, Yolanda, Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, and Marisa Belausteguigoitia, eds. 2016. Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought: Historical and Institutional and Trajectories. New York: Palgrave Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2011. “Epistemic Disobedience and the Decolonial Option: A Manifesto.” Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World 1 (2): 44–66. Miller, Daniel, ed. 2005. Materiality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Miyata Rodríguez, Etsuko. 2009. “The Early Manila Galleon Trade: Merchants’ Networks and Markets in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Mexico.” In Asia and Spanish America: Trans-Pacific Artistic and Cultural Exchange, 1500–1850. Papers from the 2006 Mayer Center Symposium at the Denver Art Museum, edited by Donna Pierce and Ronald Otsuka, 39–57. Denver: Denver Art Museum. Moffitt, John F. 1999. The Arts in Spain. London: Thames and Hudson. Moreno Villa, José. 1941. La escultura colonial mexicana. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. ———. 1949. Lo mexicano en las artes. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Mújica Pinilla, Ramón. 2016. “Arte de identitidad: las raíces culturales del barroco peruano.” La imagen transgredida: ensayos de iconografía peruana y sus políticas de representación simbólica, 13-77. Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú. Mundy, Barbara. 1993. “The Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas of New Spain, 1570-c. 1584: Native Mappings in the Conquered Land.” PhD diss., Yale University. ———. 1996. The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Neumeyer, Alfred. 1948. “The Indian Contribution to Architectural Decoration in Spanish Colonial America.” The Art Bulletin 30 (2): 104–121. New York Times. 1973. “Alfred Neumeyer, Art Historian, Dies.” January 25, 1973, 42. https://www.nytimes. com/1973/01/25/archives/alfred-neumeyer-art-historian-dies.html ———. 1984. “Harold E. Wethey.” Obituary, Section B, September 28, 1984, 8. Ocaña Ruiz, Sonia. 2009. “Enconchado Frames: The Use of Japanese Ornamental Models in New Spanish Painting.” In Asia and Spanish America:Trans-Pacific Artistic and Cultural Exchange, 1500–1850. Papers from the 2006 Mayer Center Symposium at the Denver Art Museum, edited by Donna Pierce and Ronald Otsuka, 129–140. Denver: Denver Art Museum. ———. 2013. “Nuevas reflexiones sobre las pinturas incrustadas de concha y el trabajo de Juan y Miguel González.” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 35 (102): 125–176. Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso E. 1992. La pintura barroca en España, 1600–1750. Madrid: Cátedra. ——— n.d. “Angulo Íñiguez, Diego.” Museo del Prado: 200 años. Enciclopedia. Fundación de Amigos del Museo del Prado. https://www.museodelprado.es/aprende/enciclopedia/voz/angulo-iiguez-diego/ 7297bae9-d1d6-4043-bbcf-6299cf002c23 Peterson, Jeanette Favrot. 1985. “The Garden Frescoes of Malinalco: Utopia, Imperial Policy, and Acculturation in Sixteenth-Century Mexico.” PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles.

326

Materialities and archives ———. 1993. The Paradise Garden Murals of Malinalco: Utopia and Empire in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press. Prown, Jules David. 1982. “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to the Material Culture Theory and Method.” Winterthur Portfolio 17 (1): 1–19. Reyes-Valerio, Constantino. 1978. Arte indocristiano: escultura del siglo XVI en México. Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Rishel, Joseph J., and Suzanne L. Stratton, eds. 2006. The Arts in Latin America, 1492–1820. Exhibition catalog. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Rivero Lake, Rodrigo. 2005. Namban: Art in Viceregal Mexico. Mexico City: Turner. Rivero Lake, Rodrigo, and Roberto Vallarino. 1997. La visión de un anticuario. Mexico City: Américo Arte. Robertson, Donald. 1956. “Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period.” PhD diss., Yale University. ———. 1959. Mexican Manuscript Painting of the Early Colonial Period:The Metropolitan Schools. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rosler, Martha et al. 2013. “Notes from the Field: Materiality.” The Art Bulletin 95 (1): 10–37. Russo, Alessandra. 2014. The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain, 1500–1600. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Austin: University of Texas Press. Sanabrais, Sofía. 2009a “The Biombo or Folding Screen in Colonial Mexico.” In Asia and Spanish America: Trans-Pacific Artistic and Cultural Exchange, 1500–1850. Papers from the 2006 Mayer Center Symposium at the Denver Art Museum, edited by Donna Pierce and Ronald Otsuka, 69–106. Denver: Denver Art Museum. ———. 2009b. “‘The Spaniards of Asia’: The Japanese Presence in Colonial Mexico.” Bulletin of PortugueseJapanese Studies 18–19: 223–251. Simon, Cheryl. 2002. “Introduction: Following the Archival Turn.” Visual Resources 18, no. 2, 101-107. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. London: Zed Books. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. [1988] 2010. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Colonial Discourse and PostColonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, 66–111. New York: Columbia University Press. Stoichita,Victor. 1995. Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art. London: Reaktion. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press. Terraciano, Kevin. 2010. “Three Texts in One: Book XII of the Florentine Codex.” Ethnohistory 57 (1): 51–72. Toussaint, Manuel. 1948. Arte colonial en México. Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Toussaint, Manuel. [1948] 1967. Colonial Art in Mexico. Edited and translated by Elizabeth Wilder Weismann. Austin: University of Texas Press. Toussaint, Manuel, José R. Benítez, and Dr. Atl. 1924. Iglesias de México. Mexico City: UNAM. Vargaslugo, Elisa. 1994. “La pintura de enconchados.” Mexico en el mundo de las colecciones de arte, 119–155. Vol. 4. Mexico City: UNAM/Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes. Warburg, Aby. [1923] 2004. “Memories of a Journey through the Pueblo Region.” In Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, edited by Philippe-Alain Michaud, 293–330. New York: Zone Books. Wethey, Harold E. 1949. Colonial Architecture and Sculpture in Peru. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilder, Elizabeth. 1941. “Call for Pioneers.” College Art Journal 1 (1): 6–9. Weismann, Elizabeth Wilder. 1956a. “Manuel Toussaint 1890–1955.” The Hispanic American Historical Review 36 (2): 268–270. ———. 1956b. Mexico in Sculpture 1521–1821. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1967. “Translator’s Foreward.” In Colonial Art in Mexico, edited by Manuel Toussaint and translated by Elizabeth Wilder Weismann. Austin: University of Texas Press. Wölfflin, Heinrich. [1915] 1950. Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art. Translated by M. D. Hottinger. New York: Dover. Yiengpruksawan, Mimi, Barry Flood, David Joselit, Alexander Nagel, Alessandra Russo, Eugene Wang, and Christopher Wood. 2010. “Roundtable: The Global before Globalization.” October 133 (Summer): 3–19.

327

19 PORT CITIES AS SITES OF SPATIAL KNOWLEDGE IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SPANISH AMERICA Mariselle Meléndez

In the field of colonial Latin America, space has served as a critical tool to approach the diverse ways in which individuals interacted with others on a daily basis.1 Circumscribed spaces such as the convent, casa de recogimientos or brotherhoods and more open spaces such as the street or the ocean have helped us to understand how identity and spatial constructions came to define the way in which colonial Spanish America was conceived as a fluid space of contact and how its inhabitants envisioned themselves within the spaces in which they actively lived. In particular, and as I have stated elsewhere, geography has always played a central role in the many narratives that emerged about the Americas from the perspective of chroniclers, cosmographers, and cartographers as well as colonial authorities (Meléndez 2009). Indeed, space still represents a productive analytical tool to think about the diverse political and cultural dimensions that defined colonialism in the Americas. This chapter examines the relevance that geographic space had in the eighteenth century when thinking about cultural and political interactions in the Americas. Taking into consideration Joseph L. Scarpaci’s statement that “Spain’s geography of conquest and empire relied squarely upon forts and ports” (2011, 98), my analysis is centered on how colonialism operated through the particular site of the port that as a central eighteenth-century contact zone, facilitated flows of information, policies, material goods and people. In particular, I look at ports and port cities as regions of transoceanic engagement in which ideas were formed and circulated. In addition, I pay particular attention to how in some instances race and social relationships in the frontier became part of the discursive envisioning of the port. Following Henri Lefebvre’s discussion of “spatial practice,” I discuss the role that the visual and written envisioning of the port cities played in the European and colonial imaginaries of the late colonial period. With “spatial practice” Lefebvre refers to the manner in which an individual “propounds and presupposes” society’s space in an attempt to master and appropriate it, while also deciphering it (1998, 38). In the case of the texts analyzed here, this spatial practice is discursive in nature and is deeply rooted in continuous attempts to envision the port as a space that can potentially be mastered. Geographically, the chapter will center on five South American ports: Cartagena de Indias, Callao, Guayaquil, Buenos Aires, and Montevideo. The following questions will guide my discussion: Why is it relevant to look at ports as sites of local and global contact? How, through the 328

Port cities: sites of spatial knowledge

written and visual representation of ports, was coloniality shaped and sustained? To what extent did ports as spaces and places enable us to critically understand the ways in which Spanish America was viewed, understood, and discursively produced to the rest of the world? Among the primary texts to be discussed are government accounts, legal documents, and cartographic representations pertaining to the late eighteenth century, in which the port is envisioned as a space in need of management and control due to its transient nature in which individuals come and go on a daily basis. In sum, I contend that through the written and visual representation of ports, coloniality, as a constitutive part of modernity, was shaped and sustained.2

The spatial nature of ports In the eighteenth century, the word “puerto” was understood as “a secure area guarded from wind, where ships can safely enter and find shelter from storms” (Diccionario de autoridades 425).3 The port was originally thought of as a safe place because it protected ships from strong winds and storms, serving as a haven against danger. Metaphorically speaking, it also meant asylum, protection, and shelter. Physically, ports referred to bays, coves, inlets, recesses of seas or lakes, or the mouth of a river where ships could enter safely (Webster’s Universal Dictionary of the English Language 1282). The word came from the Latin “portus, a portando” implying that through ports, goods and merchandise are brought to the mainland (Tesoro De La Lengua Castellana 1381). There is a legal aspect to this view of the port, given that in law, a port was conceived as “a place where persons and merchandise are allowed to pass into and out of a country; a place where there is a constant resort of vessels for the purpose of loading and unloading with provision made by the government of the country for enabling them to do so” (Webster’s Universal Dictionary of the English Language 1282). Indeed, in Book III, Title Seven, Law iii of Recopilación de las Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias (RLI), the Crown demanded that colonial governmental authorities “pay special attention and care to the prevention of risk and defense of the Ports.”4 Furthermore, in Law ii of the same book, the Crown demanded that viceroys, captains, and governors of the Indies not allow any individual to “produce plans or descriptions” of the ports without governmental consent.5 Ships were also prohibited from entering or leaving the ports at night without governmental consent (Book III, Title VI, Law xiiii). Spanish authorities perceived ports as places that needed to be constantly surveilled, given that through them people and goods were in constant movement. This fluidity challenged the colonial authorities’ wishes to control the ports and contributed to the emergence of the port as a spatial practice centered on ideas of management and control. In the preface to Atlantic Port Cities, Philip D. Curtin suggests that there are two ways of studying the history of ports; one is by looking at the relationship between port cities and their hinterlands, and the second, by focusing on the cultural and social relationships that emerge among “groups of people within the city itself ” (1991, xi). Although these constitute two ways in which we can understand the historical, economic, political, and social character that made ports such fascinating places, there are certainly other ways to understand the significance of ports as sites of spatial knowledge. With spatial knowledge I refer to the critical thinking of the port as a space and place. Taking into consideration the boom and decline that some ports suffered in the eighteenth century as a result of changes in the Atlantic commerce system,6 it would be appropriate to examine how ports and port cities which were active and successful during the early European Atlantic expansion, such as Callao or Cartagena de Indias, envisioned their decline in spatial terms. Conversely, it would also be very productive to see the process in reverse, by studying how colonial authorities and local individuals envisioned ports and port cities that experienced an economic growth in the eighteenth century, such as Buenos Aires and Montevideo. In the 329

Mariselle Meléndez

following pages, I am interested in examining the written and visual constructions of those ports which endured an economic and social decline in comparison to those who enjoyed a boom in “free trade” and those which were trying to find an active place within the free trade such as the case of the port city of Guayaquil. We must take the word “free” lightly because as Gabriel B. Paquette argues, “Far from ‘free’ to both the merchants who paid steep customs duties and the majority of Spaniards who remained excluded altogether from transoceanic commerce, the reformers sought to protect the ultramarine economy from foreign interference in order to expand the benefits derived from imperial trade for the Crown” (2011, 104). Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss have argued that “ports constituted the core of intellectual as well as material life. Ideas generally travelled with merchants and their goods” (1991, 7–8). However, how does one envision a space and place characterized by fluidity and the constant fluctuation of people and goods? How do ideas originate, change, and transform? Did colonial authorities, foreigners, and local inhabitants envision the ports and their cities in the same way? To address some of these questions I would like to focus on the case of the ports of Cartagena de Indias and Callao, which enjoyed great success up to the eighteenth century and compare them to the ports of Santa María de Buenos Aires and Montevideo, which in the eighteenth century witnessed more political attention. In the midst of this development, we find the case of the port city of Guayaquil, which was trying to become more active in commercial trade as a result of the 1778 Tratado de Libre Comercio. All of these ports share a significant presence of the black population as a result of the high number of African slaves that arrived there as part of the slave trade and as a source of labor.7 This in itself shaped and defined the social and cultural interactions that took place in these ports and that I believe are crucial to understand the type of coloniality that emerged there.

Re-envisioning ports: containing chaos, disorder, and freedom In the second half of the eighteenth century, and as a result of the 1778 Tratado de Libre Comercio, colonial authorities increased their efforts to monitor and control human and commercial movement into new official ports of entry.8 In the case of South America, the Port of Callao was no longer considered the official port of entry but rather one of many from which commercial exchange could be conducted. The same applied to the Port of Cartagena de Indias, which functioned as a “junction” in the trade and communication between Spain and Peru (Grahn 1991, 170). Furthermore, one must take into consideration that since the second half of the seventeenth century, “a perceptible shift” affected the commercial relevance of well-established ports, such as Callao and Cartagena, while the attention and significance of Mexican-Caribbean ports increased (Knight and Liss 1991, 4). If prior to 1778, colonial authorities were confronted with the challenge of securing the two main South American ports, what then happens when other ports officially and legally open their coasts to free trade? It is important to consider how the notion of the port as a space and place is perceived among those competing for access to free trade. As I will demonstrate, Spanish authorities and local colonial authorities tried to control the anxiety, risks, and chaos that the official opening of the coasts brought to their government. This was reflected by their interest in strengthening their military efforts, their desire to control the entry of foreigners to the ports and port cities, and their attempts to limit the freedom of local merchants in conducting open trade. A Royal Decree issued in July 1791 captures the desperate attempt of royal authorities in trying to control the influx of foreigners entering and residing in the port cities. The decree aimed to secure the “well-being and tranquility of the State.”9 In trying to fix what had become a chaotic space, the king imposed strict rules as to how to prosecute the foreigners who were populating the 330

Port cities: sites of spatial knowledge

port and its adjacent areas and that were threatening the “tranquility” of his kingdoms. The king states, “it is imperative that the status of foreigners residing in my kingdoms be clearly determined without misrepresentation, differentiating the temporary residents from the permanent residents” (Real cedula de S.M. y señores del consejo).The authorities were very concerned about the temporary residents who remained in the port cities with no official permit, as this population had grown with the opening of new ports to free trade.The main goal was to require all foreigners to register as temporary residents to better distinguish them from those who had been granted residency and to prevent the former from enjoying the privileges given to residents in order to avoid the “dire consequences” [“fatales consecuencias”] of having illegal foreigners living permanently in the port cities. The king asked colonial authorities to keep an official list of all foreigners living in the port cities, including their “homeland, religion, trade or destination, and the purpose of their residency” in the territories. He was very emphatic about examining every foreigner who arrived in the ports: “the licenses and passports of those who arrive in the ports and places of commerce will be examined, and entry from elsewhere will be prohibited without the express consent of the Royal License” [se examinaran las licencias y pasaportes con que vengan algunos a los puertos y plazas de comercio, y se impedira la entrada por otras partes sin expresa Real Licencia] (Real cedula de S.M. y señores del consejo). Authorities were required to interview foreigners and question whether they were interested in remaining as temporary residents or if they wanted to apply for residency. The latter implied having to become a subject of the Crown and to profess the Catholic faith: Permanent residents must be Catholic and swear loyalty to the religion and to my sovereignty before the law.They must renounce foreign law and any relation, union, or dependence to their Country of birth, promising not to use its protection nor that of its ambassadors, ministers, or consuls [los avencidados deberan ser Catolicos, y hacer juramento de fidelidad a la religion, y a mi soberania ante la justicia, renunciando a todo fuero de extranjeria, y a toda relacion, union y dependencia del Pays en que hayan nacido, y prometiendo no usar la protección de el ni de sus embajadores, ministros o consules]. (Real cedula de S.M. y señores del consejo) Failure to comply resulted in being sent to the galleys or expelled from the American territories. Those who requested temporary residency were prohibited from taking on jobs that entailed financial benefits: they may neither practice the Liberal Arts nor artisanal work in these kingdoms without proof of residency. Consequently, they may not become merchants…nor any type of retail vendor, tailor, seamstress, hairdresser, or shoemaker. They may not become doctors, surgeons, or architects, unless they obtain a license or by my explicit mandate. This prohibition also means that temporary residents may not become the servants or dependants of any vassal or subject of mine in these kingdoms. [que no pueden ejercer las Artes Liberales, ni oficios mecanicos en estos reinos sin avecindarse, y por consecuencia no pueden ser mercaderes de vara, ni vendedores por menor de cosa alguna, sastres, modistas, peluqueros, zapateros, ni medicos, cirujanos, arquitectos, &c, a menos que preceda licencia o mandato expreso mio; comprendiendose en esta prohibicion la de ser criados y dependientes de vasallos y subditos mios en estos dominios.] (Real cedula de S.M. y señores del consejo) 331

Mariselle Meléndez

To hold these jobs, foreigners were required to obtain an official license and they were only granted residency for two months. The rules also applied to all foreigners seeking refuge or shelter. The king ordered no exception to these rules. It is clear that ports were viewed as those places where most vigilance had to be observed. The spatial fluidity that characterized them made it very difficult to keep track of every entry and departure made by individuals. Ironically, the decree did not make any reference as to how the Crown was going to facilitate these policies, other than stressing the responsibility of the local government authorities as the enforcers of these rules. Taking into consideration the commercial nature of the ports, it was important for the Spanish authorities to regulate every aspect of the negotiations that took place there. This had to contend with the fact that local authorities found it extremely difficult to control the constant threat of foreigners wanting to attack the ports and their cities. Colonial authorities in the ports of Callao, Cartagena de Indias, Guayaquil, Santa María de Buenos Aires, and Montevideo made it clear to Spanish authorities that the security of the ports represented a constant challenge and caused fear and anxiety. For example, the viceroy of the Nuevo Reino de Granada, Dn. Josef de Ezpeleta, expressed these concerns to the King in 1796 in his Relación del gobierno del Exmo. Sor. Dn. Josef de Ezpeleta en este Nuevo Reino de Granada.10 In a section on “fortification and artillery,” Ezpeleta acknowledges the impossibility of completely and effectively protecting the coastal areas of the ports and their surroundings. He states: If one considers the fortifications as the defense and stronghold of the Kingdom, attempts should be made to establish them according to the expanse of the coasts and in the multitude of docks that appear across them. One’s imagination would be amazed to envision a project so disproportionate and difficult to execute, and even if it were possible to achieve, it would be impossible to procure the necessary troops for such extensive garrisons nor fortune to maintain them. [Si consideradas las fortificaciones como defensa y antemural del Reyno, se hubiese de tratar de establecerlas a proporción de lo que dilatan sus costas y de la multitud de surgideros que franquean, asombraia hasta la imaginación de un proyecto tan desmesurado y de tan difícil ejecución y aun cuando fuese posible conseguirlo, no lo seria el tener la tropa necesaria para tan extendidas guarniciones ni caudal para mantenerlas.] (Ezpeleta 1989, 294) Viceroy Ezpeleta considers the coastal areas, including the port city of Cartagena, as a space that is impossible to protect and manage and one that is under constant threat.The physical construction of a wall is viewed as a project so excessive and difficult that its execution would be nearly impossible. The open nature of the coasts challenged any attempt to contain them, as these spaces were characterized by their porous, fluid, and dynamic nature.The attempts to turn them into secure places or safe havens were truly illusory. Ezpeleta listed the reasons for this impossibility: “The greatest defense from invaders found on these coasts and frontiers stems from their bad temperament11 and lack of population and resources” (Ezpeleta 1989, 294). Environmental challenges and a lack of man power and resources, made the notion of a protected space an impossible task. To this, he added that the deterioration and outdated fortifications of the port city, despite the renovations made in 1786, were insufficient to defend it. He himself engaged in the expensive work of closing the bay entrance of Bocagrande and invested 10,000 pesos annually in maintaining the only open entrance to the port, Bocachica, from which sand brought to the entrance by the ocean current represented a constant problem (see Figure 19.1). Ezpeleta 332

Port cities: sites of spatial knowledge

Figure 19.1  Plano de Cartagena de Yndyas (1790) by Juan de Mota. Library of Congress.

demonstrates his frustration with the natural elements when he says that the efforts in Bocachica “will be in vain in the future, as it seems that the forces of Nature would conquer art’s efforts” (Ezpeleta 1989, 295). The viceroy stresses the impossibility of achieving total control of the physical contours of the port as the port was itself at the mercy of nature (Figure 19.1). Ezpeleta proceeded to detail the money he had invested in the dredging of the channel, the improvements made to the fortifications during his tenure, the ships he had brought in to defend the port, and the campaign to clean up Bocachica. He was also able to establish more bastions, such as Santa Clara and La Cruz, and to close the northern part of the plaza. To this, he added a long list of things that still needed to be done, such as the construction of walls around the neighborhood of Getsemani and the repairs to specific fortresses and bastions strategically located around Cartagena de Indias. Ezpeleta’s Relación underlines the challenges faced in the transformation of coastal spaces into port areas, which were and still are, by nature, characterized by their openness. In order to secure the port, it was paramount to secure the open space of the sea.  As Philip E. Steinberg indicates, after the arrival of the Europeans in the Americas, the sea “shifted from being a space of mysterious danger to being a space without nature, impossible but also remarkable” (2001, 105). Consequently, the port as a space and place suffered the constant threat entailed in the openness that surrounded it. As Mario Hernández Sánchez-Barba argues, “the enormous area to monitor and the extreme lack of population in the coastal territories, resulting in large empty spaces,” made the efficient protection of the ports and their coastal areas, and their defense against foreign attackers impossible (1992, 234). Authorities in the Audience of Quito described similar challenges when protecting the port from foreign attacks. In a document entitled, “Relacion que expresa el numero y estado de Baterias, Puentes y obras de Fortificacion, que se hallan en esta Plaza segun reconocimiento ante 333

Mariselle Meléndez

mi y testigos, por los Maestros nombrados del efecto del dia 12 del presente mes” dated April 1790, a colonial representative named Gabriel de Labayen described the poor state of the port.12 With regard to the battery of San Carlos, located in the port, Labayen explains: Its state is in absolute need and requires immediate repair to avoid total ruin…the foundation is poorly built and its struts are built with mangrove, a type of lumber that is never used for such objectives due to the ease with which it rots] [“Su estado es de una necesidad absoluta y pronta de atender a su reparo para evitar la total ruina…su piso por estar mal construido, y sus riostras ser de mangle, madera que nunca se destina para semejante objeto por su facil corrupción se hallan ya enteramente podridas y confundidas con la misma tierra.”] (1790, Milicias, Expediente 1, Archivo Histórico Nacional de Ecuador (AHNE) Labayen describes the port as a ruined space that, due to its poor construction, now finds itself in a rotten state. Indeed, this part of the port’s fortification is found to be totally useless due to its corrupted condition. He adds that these struts are found to be entirely rotten and in such a state that they are not stable enough to be used. He draws attention to the poor state of its roof and the constant water leaks that have rotted the floors. Because of this, all of the beams are rotten as well.The reason why Labayen deemed it important to let colonial authorities know about the debilitating state of this particular post is because this battery was a strategic point from which to protect the access to the Río Daule, one of the main rivers bordering the coastal city. Two years later, another document was drafted by the Commander and Captain of Militia of Guayaquil, Juan Manuel Benítez y Tabarez, to the President of the Highest Royal Court in 1792. The document, “Instruccion particular que deven observar los dependientes del Resguardo del Puerto y Provincia de Guayaquil,”13 underscores the apprehensions expressed by colonial authorities in their attempts to control the port and its adjacent areas. For example, Instruction No. 16 stated that for every ship that arrived at port, there should be an official assigned to watch over the ships’ arrivals, “prohibiting those aboard from unloading any cargo, personal effect, passenger, or crew member while in transit. Once the ship is docked, only the master of the ship may provide the registry, and after thorough examination, may disembark” [“sin permitir que se desembarque en el transito ningun equipaje, ni efecto alguno, pasajero, ni empleado en este buque, solo el Maestre que podra venir con el registro, y estando dado fondo observara la misma orden hasta pasarle visita”] (1792, Milicias, Expediente 14, AHNE). Even the ships with official licenses were monitored closely due to the fear of smuggling illegal goods or people. It was considered paramount to keep social order in place by monitoring who came into the port city. In this regard, the fifth instruction stipulated that “as long as the dependent is stationed to guard the Port, Customs, the landing dock and the shipyard, he will not allow the close proximity of gambling, music, or general uproar and will maintain all possible order” (1792, Milicias, Expediente 14, ANHE). The area adjacent to the port had to be physically clear of any social gathering to avoid any disturbances that could jeopardize the safety of the port. Once again, the port as a space and place was envisioned as one in which the comings and goings of certain people had the potential to contribute to chaos and disorder. Nevertheless, colonial authorities in Guayaquil were fully aware of the impossibility of maintaining total control of the coastal areas surrounding the port. In an addendum to the “Instruccion,” Juan Manuel Benítez y Tabarez added that the proposal to surround the port city “with stakes” was ineffective, not only due to its cost but also because even if “the Plazas are 334

Port cities: sites of spatial knowledge

surrounded by a protective wall” they “are not exempt from contraband, and that it is still necessary to have subjects stationed as guards to protect against illicit activities” (1792, Milicias, Expediente 14, ANHE).14 Again, the port city is perceived as a space that is impossible and costly to protect in its entirety, as it requires the physical presence of strongholds and of many people to guard it. Nevertheless, Benítez y Tabarez made clear that efforts to enforce security should not stop, as if properly in place these instructions had the potential to contribute to a manageable control of the port and its adjacent areas. In Relación de gobierno del Excmo. Señor Virrey del Perú, Fray Don Francisco Gil de Taboada y Lemos, presentada à su succesor el Excmo. Señor Baron de Vallenari. Año de 1796, Taboada y Lemos expressed similar concerns, as he viewed the Port of Callao and its adjacent coastal areas as difficult spaces to manage. The viceroy wrote his Relación as a guide to his successor, underscoring that his tenure from 1790 to 1796 could be considered “the most calamitous time period of the World” (1859, 303). His account was based on both his own experiences governing the viceroyalty and on the many “geographic maps” he studied. He refers to the Port of Callao and its adjacent capital of the kingdom, Lima, as the “global warehouse of the kingdom” due to the fact that prior to the 1778 Tratado de Libre Comercio, Callao was considered the official port of South America (1859, 106). For Taboada y Lemos, protecting the port and the coastal areas was paramount to the happiness and order of the viceroyalty, or as he called it, “the true happiness of the State” (1859, 304). Indeed, for the former viceroy, the “increased number of ports, coves, and docks” running north to south were considered “the key to the entire Kingdom [of Peru]” (1859, 305–306). For Taboada y Lemos, ports had to be valued as spaces that were key to the commercial, political, and social prosperity of the kingdom. Of course, the potential stability of the ports was constantly threatened by foreign powers due to Spain’s military battles against other European nations such as England and France. According to Taboada y Lemos, the Pacific Ocean had ceased to be considered dangerous to the British forces “since the English are no longer scared of the dangers of the Pacific Sea” (1859, 306). At the time, the coastal areas from Peru to Chile were viewed as some of the most difficult terrain to navigate due to their rocky nature and strong ocean currents. In the chapter entitled,“Plan de defensa de las costas del Peru, proporcionado à lo despoblado de ellas, escaseces de tropas y otras varias circunstancias actuales,” Taboada y Lemos underscored the challenges of adequately protecting the ports and coastal areas. He commented, “The extent of the coasts’ desertion and their impressive width requires an infinite number of troops, impossible to establish, in order to maintain these lands” (1859, 321). For him, the expanse and lack of population of the extensive coast made the protection of the rest of the country impossible.The Port of Callao was insufficient to secure the safety of the hinterland and its population from the intrusion of foreigners, especially due to its poor state. In this sense, the port itself fell short in fulfilling the military protection of the kingdom as the “500 leagues of coast” were too much to protect (1859, 350). For Taboada y Lemos, what happened in the coastal areas had significant repercussions on the safety of the hinterland. Although he was concerned with Callao’s ability to protect the capital city of the viceroyalty in Lima, it was the matter of the hinterland which occupied most of his concerns.15 In his efforts to draw attention to the improved defense of the coasts in order subsequently to protect the interior,Taboada y Lemos sent a map to the king that visually delineated the openness of those coasts and their intrinsic connection to the interior. The map was executed in 1792 by the cartographer Andrés Baleato and entitled “Plano del Virreynato del Perú. Arreglado á algunas observaciones astronómicas y varios Planos particulares de las Yntendencias y Partidos que comprehende. Hecho de orden del Exmo. S.Virrey Fr. Dn. Francisco Gil y Lemos” (Figure 19.2). The map was ordered by Virrey Fr. Dn. Francisco Gil de Taboada y Lemos. It was first published in 335

Mariselle Meléndez

336 Figure 19.2  “ Plano delVirreynato del Perú.Arreglado á algunas observaciones Astronómicas y varios Planos particulares de lasYntendencias y Partidos que comprehende” (1792) by Andrés Baleato. Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid.

Port cities: sites of spatial knowledge

“Discurso preeliminar en que se manifiesta el Patrimonio y recursos del Perú, con las demás aptitudes que reconoce para el Comercio” and later published by Joseph Hipólito Unanue in his Guía política, eclesiástica y militar del Virreynato del Perú para el año 1793. The bottom of the map delineated the coast of the viceroyalty by visually highlighting its length from north (left of the map) to south (right of the map), including entrances to rivers and even small islands such as Isla de Lobos in the north and Isla Blanca in the south, known later as part of the Guano Islands. Within the image, the ocean area was littered with names of coastal regions connected to the mainland through fluvial systems which were easily delineated on both sides of the map to better understand its connection to the interior.Taboada y Lemos recreates this imagery in his account, while also emphasizing those strategic points where security should be implemented through the presence of “Commanding Generals of the Coast.” Even the creeks and springs adjacent to the coast had to be monitored; this is why they are prominently depicted on the map.These generals were to be stationed in the ports where they would learn about “the ports, docks, and beaches where enemies could disembark, and the paths that led from the coast to the provinces in the mainland” (1859, 328).What I find most fascinating about the map and Taboada y Lemos’ Relación is the insistence on envisioning the ports and coastal areas as spaces which, by nature, presented great challenges to the kingdom. For him, the outer and inner areas were intrinsically connected and both deserved equal military attention, even if the coastal areas functioned as the faces of the regions. The map draws attention to this dynamic by representing the fluvial arteries accompanied by words in an attempt to visually connect the coast and the interior. In addition, as we have noticed in the case of Cartagena de Indias and Guayaquil, the port and its adjacent areas were ever more challenging to guard against foreign forces and nature itself (Figure 19.2).

Managing the southernmost ports and the racialization of space I would like to conclude this chapter by drawing attention to two lesser known ports which were officially granted permission to engage in free trade as a result of the 1778 Tratado de Libre Comercio: Buenos Aires and Montevideo, which as Alex Borucki reminds us “were the southernmost Spanish ports in the Atlantic” (2015, 2). In the case of Montevideo, the port and the city were under the jurisdiction of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata.16 Several proceedings (“actas”) of the Royal Consulate of Buenos Aires in the 1790’s attested to the busy roles both ports played in the commerce of black African slaves as a result of the opening of these ports to direct traffic with the African continent. For example, in the month of October of 1794, proceedings which stipulated rules that needed to be in place for “the free trade of slaves” in the port of Santa María de Buenos Aires were published.The citizens of the port city of Montevideo requested an extension of eight days so that “the commercial ships carrying black slaves into that Port” should remain there longer.This request was denied by governmental authorities with a decisive “in no way will this written stipulation be extended” (“Actas de este Real Cabildo de Buenos Ayres. Año 1794.” Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires, (AGNA)).17 Spanish authorities wanted to have tight control of the trade; they monitored these transactions as much as possible, starting by recording everything that was brought out of and into the ports. Their attitude toward these merchants reflects the anxiety local Spanish authorities felt about how free trade was conducted in these two port cities, especially with the direct purchase of African slaves to be sold in both ports.18 The port cities again were envisioned as fluid spaces in need of social control. Tomás Antonio Romero, a merchant from Buenos Aires known as the “Middleman of black slaves in Buenos Aires and Montevideo,” obtained royal permission in 1791 to directly export 250,000 pesos worth of hides (“cueros”) or “fruit of the country,” as he called it, to foreign ports in Europe in exchange for the purchase of African slaves to eventually be sold in both port 337

Mariselle Meléndez

cities.19 However, local authorities in Buenos Aires decided to amend the permit to allow him instead only 100,000 pesos in “cueros.” This decision forced Tomás Antonio Romero to engage in a lengthy four-year legal process, in which he defended his right to export the original sum granted instead of the 100,000 pesos. The colonial authorities in Buenos Aires insisted that “cueros” could not be considered a “fruit” and that the large numbers of leather exports could harm the cattle population, consequently causing “harm to the national trade” (Comerciales, Expediente 22, Archivo General de la Nación Argentina (AGNA). But bearing in mind that in the legal document Romero is introduced as “the only vassal in these ports of Rio de la Plata who has focused his fortune on the direct trade of black slaves” (Comerciales, Expediente 22, AGNA), it would not be surprising if the authorities’ dispute over the definition of “fruit” actually disguised their fears over the extent of the power that Romero was acquiring through the slave trade. However, what I find fascinating about this case in the context of my discussion, is the view of the ports as spaces prone to danger. The “free” aspect of the “free ports” entailed a constant threat and, as such, it required governmental control. Indeed at one point Romero tells authorities that he cannot comprehend their “fearful concerns” and that it was illogical that his proposed trade would represent a national threat: Despite the outstanding variety of reasons I have given to demonstrate that the great harm done to the national Trade and the Royal Treasury and State is purely fictional and imaginary, it was decided to follow the decision of the Royal Consulate regarding the direct removal of the hides to the foreign ports of Europe” [“A pesar de la prodigiosa variedad de razones con que se ha demostrado por mi parte, que es puramente fantastico, e imaginario el abultado perjuicio que al Comercio nacional, a la Real Hacienda, y al Estado, represento seguirsele la junta del Real Consulado por la extracción directa de cueros para puertos extranjeros de Europa.] (Comerciales, Expediente 22, AGNA) In addition, according to Romero, the authorities were also wasting a great opportunity in the slave trade by obstructing the entrance of more blacks to the ports as slaves to help in the labor force. What Romero seems to emphasize is the fact that obstacles to legal trading would contribute to more contraband. It is important to remember that since the seventeenth century in Buenos Aires, and due to a lack of colonial surveillance, as George Reid Andrews reminds us, “contraband traffic in all manner of merchandise” became prevalent there (1980, 11). As Andrews adds, “Royal attempts to control it proved useless because it was so profitable that it generated handsome bribes for the local law enforcement officials” (1980, 11). As the contraband continued as a way of life, even after the opening up of the port for trade, individuals such as Romero fought to monopolize the market. Movement in the port’s adjacent areas was strictly monitored through “Bandos” (“proclamations”) issued by governors of these two port cities in the second half of the eighteenth century. For example, in Buenos Aires, the governor at the time, Pedro de Cevallos, issued a proclamation in 1766 stipulating that to maintain “the good order of the city” it was necessary to “forbid the indecent dances which the Blacks are accustomed to have, and to prohibit meetings among them, nor with Mulatos, Indios, or Mestizos”; or that people should not engage in hiding and providing freedom to black slaves. The regulation added, “[a]nd that no person in this city nor in its jurisdiction hide male or female slaves under any pretext or motive, nor give them any encouragement to escape” (Bando, Libro 3, AGNA 1766 ). Five years later, the new governor of Buenos Aires Juan José de Vertiz y Salcedo issued another proclamation (Bando) establishing that “all vagabonds or persons with no employment, livelihood, nor master leave this city within 338

Port cities: sites of spatial knowledge

three days” and that failure to do so would result in them being deported to the Falkland Islands (Bando, Libro 3, AGNA 1771). Spatial control of racialized groups was considered paramount in the port areas to guarantee social order and control. The situation was not much different in the port city of Montevideo, where strict social control of the inhabitants was also a grave concern. Governor Don Joseph de Andonaegui stated that homeless and unemployed people were to be expelled from the city, “I order and command that within fifteen days the vagabonds and idle people within this City leave its jurisdiction and never return” (Bando, Libro 1, AGNA 1745) and failure to do so would lead to a six-year sentence in the prison of San Felipe de Montevideo.20 Indians, mulattoes, and free blacks of young age would suffer the same fate and be sent to the prison of San Felipe de Montevideo if they were caught in the streets. Foreigners who were not married were also to be expelled in a matter of twenty days and failure to leave the city would also result in jail time in San Felipe (Bando, Libro 1, AGNA 1745). In another Bando issued by the same governor, commercial interactions with people suspected of being foreigners, indigenous people, blacks, and mulattoes was forbidden due to the illegal transactions and robberies which took place among them. The governor added that he prohibited any legal resident from Spain or of Spanish descent of the port city, especially general store owners (pulperos) from purchasing anything from non-Spanish individuals,“that from this day forth no one shall buy anything from an Indian, Black, Mulatto, or any other foreign person or person suspected of being foreign” as these people engaged in the selling of stolen property (Bando, Libro 1, AGNA 1747).21 Merchants and residents who engaged in trade with them would suffer physical punishment in the public streets, a sentence of six years of manual labor on the construction of the port of Montevideo, and the loss of all their capital goods (Bando, Libro 1, AGNA 1747). Finally, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, more regulations were put into effect to monitor and control black slaves entering the port and port city. In 1793, Viceroy Nicolás Antonio de Aderrondo proclaimed another Bando “to prevent the serious harm and detriment that the introduction of negros bozales could bring upon the public safety of the city [of Montevideo].”22 The governor stipulated that all enslaved blacks imported directly from Africa (negros bozales) brought to the port of Montevideo were to pass by a specific point of entry in the port, “they must disembark precisely on the barracks and in no other place” and they were supposed to be inspected to make sure that they were “free of any contagious disease” (Bando, Libro 5, AGNA, 1793). Furthermore, during this time, the movement of the negros bozales around the port was tightly monitored, as they were only allowed to bathe in a specific creek adjacent to the port and no other place: “It is also prohibited that said negros bathe in any other place than the Creek that was established by the guards” (Bando, Libro 5, AGNA, 1793). Failure to obey these regulations resulted in the imposition of severe fines. Postings of the proclamations were to be placed in strategic places in the port city to serve as a reminder of how strict the surveillance should be. The “Bandos” pertaining to the port city of Montevideo, as was also the case in the port city of Buenos Aires, demonstrate the colonial authorities’ views of ports and adjacent coastal areas as places prone to illegality and social disorder.These, among many other proclamations issued in particular after the 1776 establishment of the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata and after the opening of both ports to free trade in 1778, underscore consistent attempts by colonial authorities to manage and control these fluid spaces of physical mobility in which blacks, along with mestizos and indigenous people, were viewed as a constant threat. To complicate matters, that time period coincided with the rise of the slave trade in these areas. According to Borucki, it is estimated that “[n]early 70,000 captives arrived from both Brazil and Africa between 1777 and 1812” (2015, 2). As Borucki adds, although this vast region “was not a plantation society, large urban black communities and social life typical of the most important slave trading ports in the Americas developed here during the late eighteenth century” (2015, 3). Ports and port 339

Mariselle Meléndez

cities continued to be viewed as those spaces most susceptible to foreigners including people of African descent, who continuously attempted to infiltrate the social order. This social order was desired by colonial authorities but impossible to achieve, due to the number of fluvial areas connected to it and the impossibility of protecting the coastal areas with military power. Untamed water represented the most dangerous ally of the port cities.

Final remarks Mario Hernández Sánchez-Barba argues that with the expansion of Spain to the Americas, “cultures were connected through the interoceanic communication” (1992, 21). To this, I must add that it was in the ports and port cities where these diverse cultures converged to produce a dynamic and fluid spaces. Ports indeed became places of contact where spatial interactions occurred and were transformed on a daily basis. In this sense ports became sites of local and global contact where people with different interests and social, racial, and national backgrounds interacted legally and illegally, contributing to a population that was mobile, transient, but sometimes rooted in the particular interests that brought them there and which most times were commercial in nature. To this extent ports as spaces and places enable us to critically understand the ways in which the outer areas of Spanish America were viewed, understood, and discursively produced to the Spanish government and the rest of the world. Henri Lefebvre reminds us that representations of space are the result of the manner in which a space is “lived” by its “inhabitants” and “users” but also by the manner in which others imagine it in order to change it and to discursively appropriate it (1998, 39). The works discussed in this chapter attest to these representational practices delineated by Lefebvre.The documents show the ways in which colonial authorities envisioned the ports as spaces in which ideologies of domination and social control were guided by the experience and knowledge that living in the port cities granted them. Deciphering the space as a spatial practice guided their views of the ports as places that needed to be managed and controlled within the confines of the cities adjacent to them. Their respective representations of space via decrees, proclamations, accounts, and visual representations underscore a feeling of impossibility as well as their persistent desire to appropriate it through the power of the law. Nevertheless, coastal areas adjacent to the official ports added to the uncertainty over total control. For the authors discussed, ports and port cities were the results of the experiences they had while living there and how the authors “recognized themselves in them” (Lefebvre 1998, 45).Through the written and visual representation of ports, enlightened forms of coloniality reemerged as ports were never seen as totally independent from the cities. Nevertheless, the mobilities enabled by the ports and their physical attributes represented a challenge to colonial authorities in their attempts to regulate, manage, and control the ports as spaces and places.

Notes 1 For a thorough discussion of the central role that space has played as a critical tool in the field of colonial Latin America, see Meléndez (2009). 2 In the context of my analysis it is important to differentiate between two often quoted terms: colonialism and coloniality. As Nelson Maldonado-Torres clearly explains, “Colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a nation or a people rests on the power of another nation, which makes such nation an empire. Coloniality, instead, refers to long-standing patterns of power that emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administration” (2010, 97). It is within this understanding of coloniality that we can consider the written and visual representations of ports as discursive venues that shaped patterns of power relations while producing new knowledge about the

340

Port cities: sites of spatial knowledge cultural encounters that took place in these geographic spaces. For a more in-depth discussion of the interconnectedness between coloniality and modernity, please see in particular the articles by Arturo Escobar, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Walter Mignolo, and Aníbal Quijano in Globalization and the Decolonial Option (2010). 3 All translations are mine unless otherwise specified. I would like to thank Laura Cummings (University of Illinois) for her assistance with some of the translations. 4 All quotes from Recopilación de leyes de los Reynos de las Indias (RLI) will follow the original orthography. In addition, all legal Spanish documents cited in this chapter will follow the original orthography. 5 According to this law, plans and descriptions of cities, villas, forts, posts or any other place were forbidden. 6 Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss state that after 1650, the collapse of the “orderly system of ships” that connected Spain to the Atlantic and the small ships sent to South America contributed to the decline of the northern ports of South America (1991, 4). For example, more than half of the imports to Spain came from Mexican Caribbean ports and in particular Veracruz (4). 7 Another case that I analyze in my larger project is the one of Portobello in which piracy contributed to a significant number of African slaves fleeing to this less surveilled port. 8 Prior to 1778, the strict imperial commercial routes established by the Crown required that treasure fleets depart from the Yucatán channel, stopping in Cabo San Antonio and Havana before continuing on to La Florida, the Azores Islands and then finally, to Spain. This was known as part of the northern fleet while the southern fleet “carried the commerce of South America via Portobello and Cartagena” with Callao subsequently becoming a major port of entry (Kuethe 1991, 14). 9 Hereafter, I will cite the document as follows: “Real cedula de S.M. y señores del consejo.” 10 According to the Leyes de Indias, Law XXIV, Title III, Book III, every viceroy was required to write an account of what he had done during his governance and what still needed to be done. The accounts became a guide for future successors in an effort to facilitate the governing of the American territories. 11 “Temperament” at the time was defined as “the constitution of the air or environment in terms of the cold, heat, humidity, or dryness” (Diccionario de Autoridades, 1990, 240). 12 This document is found in the Archivo Histórico Nacional de Ecuador under Milicias, Expediente 1. 13 This document is also found in the Archivo Histórico Nacional de Ecuador under Milicias, Expediente 14. 14 In this document Benítez y Tabarez addresses Don Luis Muñoz de Guzmán, who was the Superintendent and Subdelegate of the Royal District of Guayaquil. Muñoz de Guzmán compiled Benítez y Tabarez’s instructions to send them to the king, Charles IV. 15 Taboada y Lemos does devote a section of his Relación to the role that the port of Callao had in the protection of Lima from potential foreign invasion. 16 As a result of the Bourbon reforms, the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata was established in 1776. The newly established viceroyalty had jurisdiction over regions of Upper Peru (Real Audiencia of Charcas (today Bolivia), and regions of what are today Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay, with Buenos Aires as the capital. 17 These documents are found in the Archivo General de la Nación in Buenos Aires, Argentina under the title “Actas de este Real Consulado de Buenos Ayres. Año de 1794.” Libro 1ro. 18 For a detailed discussion of slavery and the slave trade in the Río de la Plata since the first import of African slaves into the region in 1534, see the third chapter of George Reid Andrews’s book, The AfroArgentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900 (1980). It is important to note that in 1701 Spain had already granted the French Guinea Company permission to conduct trade operations in these territories due to the inefficiency of the Portuguese Cacheu Company (Andrews 1980, 25). Eventually, due to the Crown’s dissatisfaction with the French company, permission was granted to the British South Sea Company to hold asientos (royal concessions) between 1715–1750. 19 Romero wanted to export the “cueros” to England, Portugal, and the Netherlands. He made clear to colonial authorities in Buenos Aires that it was crucial that they allow him to freely conduct trade with the main ports in these countries (Comerciales, Expediente 22, AGNA 1793). 20 The “Bando” was emitted by Spanish brigadier Don Joseph de Andonaegui, who was also captain and governor of the provinces of the River Plate between 1745–1756. 21 This Bando is titled, “Por cuanto, sin embargo de los repetidos bandos publicados…” 22 The title of this policy is, “Para precaver los males y prejuicios que pueden seguirse de la salud publica de las introducciones que se hacen a esta Capital de partida de Negros Bozales.”

341

Mariselle Meléndez

Works cited Adonaegui, Don Joseph de. 1745. Por el presente ordeno mando a todos los Vezinos Moradores de esta Ciudad y su jurisdiccion restantes habitantes en ella Observen, Guarden y Cumplan los Capitulos siguientes primeramente ordeno mando que dentro de quinze días salgan desta dicha Ciudad y sus dominios todos los Bagamundos, Olgazanes que hubiere en ella y no vuelvan pena de que sean desterrados al Presidio Plaza San Felipe de Montevideo. Bandos. Libro 1. Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires. ———. 1747. Por cuanto, sin embargo de los repetidos bandos publicados para que ninguna persona de cualquier calidad o condición que sea compre a ningún indio, negro, mulato ni otra persona española sospechosa de ser forastera cosa alguna de cuyos mandatos se ha abusado y por esta razón se cometen diferentes hurtos. Bandos. Libro 1. Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires. ———. 1793. Para precaver los males y prejuicios que pueden seguirse de la salud publica de las introducciones que se hacen a esta Capital de partida de Negros Bozales asi para su venta en ellos como para llebarlos a Provincias interiores, mando. Bandos. Libro 5. Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires. Andrews, George Reid. 1980. The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Benítez y Tabarez, Juan Manuel. 1792. “Instruccion particular que deven observar los dependientes del Resguardo del Puerto y Provincia de Guayaquil.” Milicias. Expediente 14. Archivo Histórico Nacional de Ecuador. Borucki, Alex. 2015. From Shipmates to Soldiers. Emerging Black Identities in the Río de la Plata. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Cevallos, Pedro de. 1766. Por cuanto han sido infructuosos los repetidos bandos que se han promulgado hasta ahora, mandado componer las calles de esta ciudad, como asimismo sobre otros asuntos convenientes al buen gobierno, y bien publico, dando las reglas, y modo que se han de guardar para ello, sin que se haya verificado, cediendo en perjuicio del bien comun. Bandos. Libro 3. Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires. Covarrrubias Horozco, Sebastián de. 2006. Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española. Navarra, Spain: Universidad de Navarra Editorial Iberoamericana. Curtin, Philip D. 1991. “Preface.” In Atlantic Port Cities. Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850, edited by Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss, xi–xvi. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. España, Escolano de Arrieta, Pedro. 1791. Real cedula de S.M. y señores del consejo, en que por punto general se manda, que las justicias hagan matriculas de los extrangeros residentes en estos reynos con distincion de transeuntes y domiciliados, y se establecen las reglas que deberan observarse y el modo de permitir la entrada de los que vengan de nuevo a estos reinos. Madrid: Oficina de la Viuda de Pedro Marín. Ezpeleta, Josef de. 1989. “Relación del gobierno del Exmo. Sor. Dn. Josef de Ezpeleta en este Nuevo Reino de Granada con expresión de su actual estado en los diversos ramos que abraza, de lo que queda por hacer y de lo que puede adelantarse en cada uno, 1796.” In Relaciones e informes de los gobernantes de la Nueva Granada, edited by Germán Colmenares,Vol. 2:153–311. Bogota: Biblioteca Banco Popular. Grahn, Lance R. 1991. “Cartagena and its Hinterland in the Eighteenth Century.” In Atlantic Port Cities. Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850, edited by Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss, 168–195. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Hernández Sánchez-Barba, Mario. 1992. El mar en la historia de América. Madrid: Editorial Mapfre. Knight, Franklin W., and Peggy K. Liss. 1991. “Introduction.” In Atlantic Port Cities. Economy, Culture, and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850, edited by Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss, 1–12. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Kuethe, Allan J. 1991. “Havana in the Eighteenth-Century.” In Atlantic Port Cities. Economy, Cultures and Society in the Atlantic World, 1650–1850, edited by Franklin W. Knight and Peggy K. Liss, 13–39. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Labayen, Gabriel de. 1790. “Relacion que expresa el numero y estado de Baterias, Puentes y obras de Fortificacion, que se hallan en esta Plaza segun reconocimiento ante mi y testigos por los Maestros nombrados.” Milicias. Expediente 1. Archivo Histórico Nacional de Ecuador. Lefebvre, Henri. 1998. The Production of Space. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers. Maldonado-Torres, Nelson. 2010. “On the Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept.” In Globalization and the Decolonial Option, edited by Walter D. Mignolo and Arturo Escobar, 94–124. New York: Routledge.

342

Port cities: sites of spatial knowledge Meléndez, Mariselle. 2009.“The Cultural Production of Space in Colonial Latin America: From Visualizing Difference to the Circulation of Knowledge.” In The Spatial Turn: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Barney Warf and Santa Arias, 172–191. New York: Routledge. Mignolo, Walter D., and Arturo Escobar, eds. 2010. Globalization and the Decolonial Option. New York: Routledge. Paquette, Gabriel B. 2011. Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and Its Empire, 1759–1801. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Real Academia Española. 1990. Diccionario de Autoridades. Madrid: Gredos Recopilación. 1791. Recopilación de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias. Madrid: Viuda de Joaquin Ibarra, Impresora de Dicho Real y Supremo Consejo. Romero,Tomas Antonio. 1792-1795.“Romero introductor de Negros en Buenos Ayres y Montevideo, que ha obtenido permiso por Real Cedula de 24 de Noviembre de 1791 para exportar frutos del pays gestiona se reglamente esa actividad.” Comerciales. Expediente 22. Archivo Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires. Scarpaci, Joseph L. 2011. “Forts and Ports.” In Mapping Latin America: A Cartographic Reader, edited by Jordana Dym and Karl Offen, 98–102. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Steinberg, Philip E. 2001. The Social Construction of the Ocean. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Taboada y Lemos, Don Francisco Gil de. 1859. “Relación de gobierno del Excmo. Señor Virrey del Peru, Fray Don Francisco Gil de Taboada y Lemos, presentada à su succesor el Excmo. Señor Baron de Vallenari. Año de 1796.” In Memoria de los Virreyes que han gobernado el Perú durante el tiempo del coloniaje español.Vol.VI. Lima: Librería Central de Felipe Bailly. Vertiz y Salcedo, Juan José de. 1771. Por el presente ordeno y mando a todos los vecinos y moradores de esta Ciudad, y su jurisdicción observen, guarden, y cumplan lo siguiente. Bando. Libro 3. Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires. Webster, Noah. 1939. Webster’s Universal Dictionary of the English Language. New York, NY: The World Syndicate Publishing Company.

343

20 SPATIALITY AND DISCOURSE IN THE REGION OF LA PLATA Loreley El Jaber

Mud and hunger After we returned to our fortress (…) a settlement and a fortress were built for our captain General Don Pedro de Mendoza and a mud wall around the city the height one can reach with a foil. This wall, too, was three feet wide, and what was erected today came tomorrow to the ground again; more people did not have anything to eat and they were starving and suffered from a great shortage….1 [Después que nosotros vinimos de nuevo a nuestro real (…) se levantó un asiento y una casa fuerte para nuestro capitán general don Pedro de Mendoza y un muro de tierra en derredor de la ciudad de una altura hasta donde uno puede alcanzar con un florete. También este muro era de tres pies de ancho y lo que se levantaba hoy se venía mañana de nuevo al suelo; a más la gente no tenía qué comer y se moría de hambre y padecía gran escasez….] (Schmidl [1567] 2016, 16)

From Luis Ramírez, (a member of the Sebastián Caboto's expedition), to the first founder of Buenos Aires, Pedro de Mendoza, failure and deceit haunted the colonization of the Río de la Plata. Paradoxically, Ramírez’s letter from July 10, 1528 renders the place name of the river and the region within the context of a failed venture. Seeing his dreams shattered over difficulties encountered he writes: I truly say to Your Majesty that in the whole journey we did not work as much or endure as many dangers as in fifty leagues that we journeyed up [the river]…we endured so many difficulties that I have to admit to Your Majesty, I do not think there are enough words to be able to describe them. [digo de verdad a Vuestra Majestad que en todo el viaje no pasamos tantos trabajos ni peligros como en cincuenta leguas que subimos por él [río] … pasé infinitos trabajos, y tantos que yo doy fe a vuestra majedad, no creo bastase lengua de hombre a poderlos contar.] (1941, 1: 96–97) Nearly 10 years later, in one of the last communications by the Adelantado Don Pedro de Mendoza, he pleaded for “a single pearl or jewel, if you would have one for me because I have nothing to eat in Spain” (“alguna perla o joya sy ovieredes avido para mi que saveis que no tengo 344

Space, movement and writing

que comer en España”) (Mendoza [1537] 1941, 2: 190). Colonists’ letters sent to Spain from Río de la Plata, such as these, painfully questioned the promise of the mythical land. For Ramírez each defeat marked the impossibility of reaching the gold-bearing lands that had fueled so many expeditions into South America’s interior. This was true for Mendoza and many others across the Americas. Upon entering the inferno of the cursed and harsh “tierra malsana” (unhealthy land), conquistadors, settlers, and missionaries demystified the imperial imaginary, and all expectations of economic and spiritual gain, even of the exotic aesthetic qualities described in accounts of the still unknown parts of the continent. After the first settlement of Buenos Aires, in June 1536, Pedro de Mendoza (ca. 1499–1537) sent an expedition toward the Querandíes people for food, which had been withdrawn by them all of a sudden. Natives had been amicable since the beginning by facilitating much-needed provisions but the settlers’ demands led to an indigenous rebellion. Severe consequences for the Querandíes, who lost, were supposed to follow, but without captives and only scarce food supplies, the Spaniards had lost too. At this critical juncture, Mendoza attempted to establish a clear and distinct boundary, a frontier demarcating physical and socio-cultural spaces; but he failed again.The Querandíes crossed the boundary and became intrusive enemies. The wall ­crumbled— the same wall that served as a protective barrier to secure the first European settlement. Hunger became the most significant driver of colonial transgressions affecting the soldiers’ way of life, crushing their moral compass. Degraded Spaniards ate rats and feces; to put it another way, barbaric Christians consumed themselves. Nothing had been so extreme as these descriptions. Transatlantic accounts of heroic conquests, which had been circulating in Europe since Columbus’s 1493 letter, were unknown amid the misery and self-degradation that distinguished reports from the Río de la Plata region. Landscapes such as this one, overwhelmed imperial subjects. In accounts of conquest or defeat, the riverine topography of the Río de la Plata swayed the colonists’ moral judgment and social dynamics, thus defining and redefining their identities. The muddy soil, an intrinsic quality of the region, threatened all modes of containment; but in the conquistadors’ writing, the mud, as a trope, epitomizes the challenges encountered after each act of possession. The mud swallowed everything that was built. In such unwelcoming conditions without the possibility to build or to move forward because of starvation, the geographical space took over. It made the wall crumble and, with it, immediate expectations of imperial expansion. The experience and trope of mud and hunger define the first colonial settlements at Río de la Plata (see Figure 20.1). Yet historical accounts of the failed conquest and settlement of this territory are seldom told. In the field of literary and cultural studies, there is a noticeable lack of critical attention toward colonial discourses on the conquest of Río de la Plata. Critical approaches by Ricardo Rojas (1960), Cristina Iglesia (1987), and Gustavo Verdesio (2001) sought—against the grain of patriotic assessments— to restore the sense of spatiality, a move that stepped away from the obvious iteration of hunger that marked their accounts. Considering their efforts, I bring to the forefront the need to reconstruct the plurality of experiences and affective responses to Other spaces. To do so, this chapter reexamines the geographical construction of the region (Río de la Plata and the Jesuit Province of Paraguay), which allows me to untangle the connection between practices, topographies, and tropographies (mappings of speech acts or “the writing of motions through a landscape” [Kelen 2007, 64]). I focus on the territory and its political, intercultural, and gnoseological implications. This perspective allows me to account for the plurality of meanings that characterize territorial space (Arias & Meléndez 2002; Gregory 1998). From this perspective, I propose the reconstruction of a network of interacting bodies and discourses that are always in constant movement. As Henri Lefebvre reminds us, “Space is not a passive locus of social relations” (1991, 11). 345

Loreley El Jaber

Figure 20.1  “ Hunger in Buenos Aires,” in Ulrico Schmidl,Vera historia admirandae cuius dam navigationis quam uldericus Strawbingensis, ab Anno 1534 usque ad anum 1554, in American vel novum Mundum, iuxta Brasiliam & Rio della Plata…. (Levinus Hulsius, Nüremberg Edition, 1599. Work in the public domain)

With their people as with their women While Mendoza, afflicted by syphilis, dictated instructions for Juan de Ayolas (ca. 1510–1538), the latter, having gone up the Paraguay River to the port of La Candelaria, had marched toward the western region in search of the White King and the Sierra de la Plata. Before departing for Spain and dying at sea, Mendoza asked Domingo Martínez de Irala (1509–1556) to wait for Ayolas, who had been named by him as his lieutenant in Buenos Aires. But the promotion did not materialize. (Martínez de Irala), who later became governor, depopulated the port in 1541 and marched toward Asunción. Fifteen months later, without yet having reached the Río Grande,Ayolas returned to the now deserted settlement just to be killed by the Payaguá Indians together with all of his companions. Depopulation was triggered for several reasons: hunger, the uncertain wait for Ayolas—from whom there was no news—the fear of a possible rebellion by the numerous surrounding tribes (i.e., Payaguá, Querandíes, and Charrúas) (Peña 1904, 5), and the advantages of relocating to the shores of the Río Paraguay. Indeed, they established the Outpost of Nuestra Señora de Santa María de la Asunción. On the one hand, the new outpost was closer to the Sierra de la Plata; on the other, the region of Paraguay offered indigenous labor to satisfy Spanish ambitions (Assadourian 1992). The relocation did not relate solely to specific and conjectural circumstances; it also responded to the need to reconfigure colonial space. Thus, the forced movement of people needs to be understood in socio-economic terms: gold, bodies, and waterways were the key elements to guarantee commerce. Waterways made possible communication and transfer in two directions: 346

Space, movement and writing

to move the loot from the entradas and to access the goods received from Spain. As laid out in this corpus, gold and bodies were conceived as precious commodities. Indian bodies had an exchange value, and their acquisition and exchange established the status of whoever could afford such a “possession” (El Jaber 2001). Before the settlers’ relocation, Irala buried a letter at the site ([1541] 1898). The letter offers a warning to future expeditions about the dangers of the region and persuades them to move to the new location with Guaraní natives for labor (including women), who could effortlessly be converted to Christianity. The abundance of bodies represents the affective-economic construct of excess. Asuncion became a strategic place, the “promised city,” and space that by occupation was transformed and consumed (see Figures 20.2 and 20.3). It is important to note that Irala had the power over its commodities (space and new colonial subjects for service). But although the acquisition of native bodies as slaves was a common practice among settlers, the difference lies in the legitimacy of domestic arrangements or marriages to indigenous women on which colonial settlements thrived. Irala promoted intermarriage to an extreme; for instance, he forced the rebellious Spaniards to marry their mestizo daughters if they wish to save their lives (Díaz de Guzmán [1612] 1974).This strategic tool of coloniality was implemented as part of the strategic “alliance code” (El Jaber 2011) created to achieve harmony among different indigenous groups through their unions. It came to be called the “cuñadazgo,” which further justified Spaniards’ ordering of the territory on the grounds of family ties. Alliances allowed for the acquisition of lands populated by native inhabitants who had geographical knowledge and were skilled as warriors and guides. These unions were mutually beneficial. For the Guaraní they were rooted in

Figure 20.2  Frederik de Wit, Noua et accurata totius Americae tabula 1660. (Work in the public domain)

347

Loreley El Jaber

Figure 20.3  D  etail of the area corresponding to Paraguay from the Map by Frederik de Wit, Nova et accurata totius Americae tabula 1660. (Work in the public domain)

their own cultural practices of intertribal exchange, and in the new context, they served as a strategy to gain allies (Meliá 1997; Susnik 1975). The Guaraní rejoices significantly/for seeing himself related to the Christians:/each of them assigned a wife/parents, and closer relatives./Oh pity for seeing so pitiful,/that from these young women all brothers,/to those who cohabit,/nowadays are called cuñados!/The situation reaches a point such,/that each one lived as they liked: who had the most beautiful Indian wife,/is judged to be better, and more spirited-/(…) In this case there was no amendment,/for a bad custom generally it was,/who had agreed to put on the rein,/without exception would cut down it all;/they learn from school and from the stores/the rest about this will learn from Irala;/who although agreed on many things,/about flesh undomesticated. [El Guaraní se huelga en gran manera/de verse emparentar con los cristianos:/a cada cual le dan su compañera/los padres, y parientes más cercanos./¡O lástima de ver muy lastimera,/que de aquestas mancebas los hermanos,/ a todos los que están amancebados,/les llaman hoy en día sus cuñados!/A tal término llega aquesta cosa,/ que cada cual vivía a su albedrío: aquél que india tenía más hermosa,/se juzga por mejor, y de más brío./(…) No había en este caso alguna enmienda,/por ser en general costumbre mala,/que aquel que convenía poner la rienda,/sin guarda de excepción todo lo tala;/ aprenden de la escuela y de la tienda/en esto los demás todos de Irala;/ que aunque era de muchas cosas concertado,/en esto de la carne desenfrenado./.] (Centenera [1602] 1998: Canto IV) For Irala and the vast majority of the soldiers, power was held by the number of bodies which could be counted by their side. He didn’t bother with issues of morality that scared away priests 348

Space, movement and writing

who insisted on describing Asunción as the “Sodoma del Plata” (Salas 1960). The alliance with the Guaraní was maintained from 1541 to 1543 after its founding; however, years later, the Indians faced a new reality: Europeans no longer recognized intermarriage and the bond it established with Spaniards who married native women. As a result, the Guaraní declared war. The reconfiguration and use of space and bodies that Irala and his men deployed would become the key points of dissidence and conflict with Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (ca. 1500–ca. 1559). He was sent by the Crown as Adelantado in 1541 when the prospects of economic gain were still high. During that time, Ayola’s experience remained unknown in Madrid. At the court, the only concern was for the needs of the survivors from the Mendoza expedition.When Cabeza de Vaca arrived in Santa Catalina, he learned of the move and depopulation of the port and therefore decided to march toward Asunción. Upon entering the settlement, he was immediately forced to manage the chaos, violence, irreligiosity, and dismissal of administrative policies. The unmanageable colonists forced natives into slavery, punished them, took their women, and even, when jealous, risked their own lives (Cabeza de Vaca [1545] 1906; [1555] 1985). Given the freedom with which Indians were mistreated, Cabeza de Vaca attempted to reestablish order by underscoring Old World values and rules. He dictated a series of ordinances intended to reinstate governance, civility, and change the behavior of the soldiers. He prohibited the Spaniards from having contact with or marrying native women, from collecting debts owed to his Majesty, from removing any natives from their land, thus diminishing the labor force. It was not permitted to sell, hire, or exchange free natives as slaves (Adorno and Pautz 1999). Ordinances were carried out in the spirit of colonial laws as Cabeza de Vaca sought to impose an imperial morality (of which the Adelantado, considered himself to be an example, as he wrote in his own account and as was reiterated in the writings of his notary, Pero Hernández ([1545] 1906). Cabeza de Vaca prohibited cohabitation and violence, yet he fought indigenous groups resisting conversion. When one is reminded of his experience in New Spain’s northern frontier, such proclaimed morality and performance of power in the Río de la Plata, seems out of character. In view of the absence of riches imagined, the encomiendas (land and bodies) gained in value. Irala’s last letter to the Consejo de Indias literally alluded to the imperial production of this space, which demonstrates the currency of Henri Lefebvre’s ideas to the colonial context: After having seen the excessive efforts of those who conquered this province and the little profit gained, and how the Indians have nothing to offer but themselves (…) I divided the land among three hundred and twenty or so men, so it helped them bear all their work and all such Indians who were thus shared out were up to twenty thousand. (…) [I did it] to compensate the conquistadors for their age and labor. In my opinion your majesty should order all these distributions to be granted in perpetuity (…) because if this is not done, I believe that (…) it will be impossible to live in this land. [Vistos los trabajos excesivos delos conquistadores desta provincia y el poco provecho dello y como los indios no tienen otra cosa con que poder servir sino solamente sus personas (…) repartí la tierra en trescientas y veinte o más hombres para que les ayudasen a sobrellevar sus trabajos y todos los dichos indios que así se repartieron serían hasta veinte mil (…) [Lo hice] por dar a los conquistadores algún alivio por estar viejos y cansados. Mi parecer sería que su majestad mandase que todos los dichos repartimientos (...) [fuesen] perpetuos (…) porque si esto no se hace me parece que (…) en esta tierra no se puede vivir.] (Martínez de Irala [1556] 1941: 485) 349

Loreley El Jaber

Although the desire for gold and bodies needed for the encomienda continued to be a priority for the metropolis, Irala’s letter communicates a conclusive reality: in the region of La Plata, the encomienda is the only reward for the “excessive efforts” without “profit.” Thus, this is the procedure that brings new meaning to the body of the native. In the end, the legality inscribed in the regulations imposed by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca is resented. His leadership and ideas about good government are questioned due to his lack of knowledge about the land. That is why he ends up imprisoned as a traitor to the king. As explained by Ralph Bauer (2003), what is at stake, in this case, is the dispute on geopolitical grounds between the Crown and insubordinate settlers with neo-feudal ambitions. The resulting entanglements of power are repaired in epistemic and ideological terms given different forms of knowledge and ways of thinking in the production of coloniality (El Jaber 2014).The native population is central to such a dispute: the Other is a basic commodity for the construction of social space for both the Crown and the settlers. Therefore, after Cabeza de Vaca is imprisoned and sent to Spain, Irala restores his position by putting back in place the imperial order that Cabeza de Vaca had undermined. “Rancheadas” (violent captures of women, youngsters, and children as well as goods) and trade with Brazil came back due to their great potential for profit. Irala installed a governing policy and turned his back on Spain, to focus on the interior of the land and its borders. It is precisely at the frontier spaces where the real potential of the land can be found. Irala’s powerful command, combined with the appetite of his peers created a new colonial vision for the world, that of the mestizo asunceño (mestizo from Asunción). The result is quite different from the failures experienced by Pedro de Mendoza or Cabeza de Vaca. He was chosen by most people as interim Governor of Río de la Plata at various points in time (1539–1542/1544–1548/1549) until his death, although not acknowledged by the king until 1555, when there was no one left to compete against him for the asiento. As an unquestioned military leader of popular appeal and strong form of government, Irala can be conceived as the genesis of Argentina’s caudillismo.

The Guaraní, encomienda and reduction Although the Spanish population fosters the colonial conception that maintains an essential difference with the Indian, the idea collides with the advantages that, according to the Guaraní socio-cultural universe, the kinship system offered them. The actions that take place in the rancheadas and on the bodies of the native encomendados evince the idea that the concepts of “friends,” “allies,” even “brothers-in-law” were void of meaning. The Indians’ reactions to the violence had two movements: either withdrawal or resistance. The rebellion of 1545–1546 constitutes the Guaraní’s general response to the harassments experienced at the hands of the conquistadors (Susnik 1975), as well as the event that accounts for the “emergence of an indigenous conscience under construction,” which can be observed, for example, in a tactic of resistance that involved joining forces with other tribes—unthinkable at other moments (Roulet 1993). After the defeat of the Guaraní uprising, the natives expressed their opposition by running away as well as through apathy and indolence, by abandoning their duties or taking their own lives. Priest Martín González said in 1570 that due to the abusive treatment, Guaraní women, in an attempt to free their children from mistreatment, would kill them in their wombs or would not breastfeed the newborns so that they died. Others ate soil, or anything that could put an end to their lives sooner (Roulet 1993, 256). Guaraní encomendadas even harmed their own bodies, which can be understood as an acknowledgment of the power of their masters. The experience of the encomienda had profound consequences not limited to their pessimism but also in the deep trauma that marked their lives. Escaping to the mountains, running away from their lands and kin can be read as another way of putting an end to a life that had neither identity nor agency. 350

Space, movement and writing

On the other hand, breaking the bond by moving away opened up the possibility of survival, freedom, and renewal. For indigenous people, their mountains, rivers and soils have always been sacred. Prior to the arrival of the first conquistadors space already had political-cultural meanings. With the flows and movements created by so many Guaraníes escaping to the mountains, new political and social consequences were felt in shifting demographics, regional economy, and much more. If what prevails is this resilience by subtraction of commodities, what happened to the awareness of a native identity reaffirmed with the rebellion of 1545? Even more so, what were the consequences for the territory and the bodies that remained at the Río de la Plata when the encomienda became the only meaningful political-economic system? It will be necessary then to wait for the Jesuits and their reductions—those settlements of Guaraníes, promoted by the Fathers of the Compañía de Jesús, to guard their identity as vassals of the Crown—to find out if the native peoples found a new means of resistance or at least a way to escape their misery (Wilde 2009). Guaraníes were threatened, on one side, by their integration into the new encomienda system of semi-slavery; and, on the other side, by the hunting of the bandeirantes paulistas—men originally from São Paulo who captured and imprisoned indigenous people for slavery. We should bear in mind that upon the creation of the Jesuit Province of Paraguay, Father Diego de Torres Bollo was designated as Provincial to direct the activities of the Compañía de Jesús and address the abuses of the natives.2 Following the Lascasian perspective, according to Torres, the reduction and encomienda were two incompatible systems; therefore, his first measures consisted in setting free the Indians assigned to the Compañía and guaranteeing conditions of autonomy for the missions. These measures, together with a selfsustained economic organization, in addition to traditional institutions and structures, were readapted to the new missionary spaces. In the missions, the Jesuits turned their utopian dream of the recovery of a threatened culture into reality. On the other hand, for the Guaraníes, the missions represented the only way out from domination and slavery.3 The proposal to release Indians from ten years of forced labor in the mission found its first opposition among colonists at nearby settlements given that they depended on the encomienda system for their subsistence—especially for the harvest and processing of yerba mate (Sarreal 2014). Although the initiatives of both Torres and the Jesuits were criticized for promoting the isolation of the Guaraníes (Asúa 2014), their relationship with the missionaries led them to a new way of life in the reductions. The space of the mission contributed to a new Jesuit-Guaraní identity shaped by religiosity, responsibilities, and a sense of community created by the environment of the mission. Reductions in the riverine region of the Paraguay and Uruguay waterways became what Denis Cosgrove describes as identitary spaces (1989). The Guaraní became warriors and vigilantes of the territory against other indigenous groups but mostly against the Portuguese, who destabilized the Spanish colonial dynamics of the Río de la Plata from the early years of missionary settlement (see Figure 20.4).4 What started as a spontaneous indigenous organization against the bandeirantes would become another military tactic of the Crown to secure imperial territory from enemies at the frontier both Portuguese and indigenous (Guaycurús, Payaguás, Mbayás, Charrúas, Bohanes, and Minuanes). To confront the recurring actions of Portuguese enslavers, the Jesuits obtained the concession for the use of firearms by Indians who became skilled with these weapons. The Jesuit-Guaraní military alliance created to resist the Portuguese banderiantes became permanent militia (Avellaneda & Quarleri 2007). Their presence not only assured the success of the reductions but also transformed the internal structure of missions (Neumann 2000a; Kern 1982). What had been described as the initial isolation of the missions was forgotten—in part because Jesuit designs that imagined outward expansion of the missionary space, also influenced 351

Loreley El Jaber

Figure 20.4  M  apa de la governación del Paraguay, y de la de Buenos ayres by José Cardiel. It represents the 30 Jesuit reductions, ranches, and mate plantations between the rivers Paraná and Uruguay. (Work in the public domain)5

352

Space, movement and writing

the spatiality of the Guaraní reductions. To imagine isolated reductions negates social, cultural, economic, political, and military dynamics affecting the Guaraníes directly, as key actants of the functioning of the reduction, and also as royal militia. It has been argued that the missions were established out of the need to demarcate borders, especially those with the Portuguese territory (Barcelos 2000). One needs then to consider their permeability as the key aspect of this complex zone of interaction among imperial and colonial subjects with different affiliations.

The Treaty of Madrid (1750) and the case of the Guaraní wars: toward a policy of mobility If time-space compression can be imagined in that more socially formed, socially evaluative and differentiated way, then there may be here the possibility of developing a politics of mobility and access. For it does seem that mobility, and control over mobility, both reflects and reinforces power. (Massey 1994, 150) In January 1750, the Crowns of Spain and Portugal signed the first treaty of limits—Treaty of Madrid—deleting for once and for all the straight line of Tordesillas and changing the geopolitical thinking about the vast continental regions of South America. With regards to the Río de la Plata region, the treaty meant for Spain the return of Colonia del Sacramento by relinquishing to Portugal the territory lying to the east of the Uruguay River and the north of Ibicuy, where seven Jesuit missions had been established. Although the treaty negotiated over other territories, the concession of the missions to Portugal constitute the beginning of a conflict that resulted in the so-called “Guaraní war.”6 Reduced natives compromised by the treaty were authorized to remain under the Portuguese or to move to the new territories under Spanish jurisdiction. Clearly, the only option was moving. The forced displacement of the Guaraníes from their villages implied, as stipulated in the treaty, that the missionaries would withdraw with all their properties, taking the Indians with them to settle in Spanish territory. Immovable assets such as churches, houses, their respective yerbales, cotton fields and cattle ranches, were to be handed over to the Portuguese.The Guaraníes felt the contradiction: how could the king himself have given them weapons to defend their lands against the bandeirantes paulistas and now everything that had been built was turned over to them? To execute the terms of the treaty, a demarcation commission was organized, whose activities included monitoring the exodus of some 30,000 Indians belonging to the missions (Motoukias 2000). But the exodus did not occur, and the consequences foreseen by the Jesuits were as terrible as they were certain. As Father Bernardo Nusdorffer describes, in 1750, the Jesuits could not believe that the Treaty was real: “it was judged impossible that Spain permitted the terrible consequences” (se juzgaba imposible que España consintiese por las fatalísimas consecuencias”) (Nusdorffer 1755, 142). Once the treaty was confirmed, he was responsible for put into action the transfer of the seven settlements (San Nicolás, San Luis, San Lorenzo, San Borja, San Miguel, San Juan, and San Ángel) directly affected by the new demarcation line. Although there were several missionaries who were reluctant to fulfill the orders, the majority were impelled to comply, even if the treaty was considered “most iniquitous,” as described by Tadeo Henis in 1754. Provincial Father Joseph de Barreda, in his letter dated January 19, 1753, exhorts the missionaries to obedience. He argues that the options are not many: the missions do not have the strength to go against the Monarchy’s sovereign power. The situation was even worse if we consider the slanders of instigation and collaboration with the rebellious Indians from local authorities and key advisors to the Crown. In fact, the conflagration of circumstances will end up undermining 353

Loreley El Jaber

the strength of the Company and propitiating a negative climate culminating in the Jesuits’ final expulsion from the region in 1767. Although the Jesuits considered the Spanish officials’ behavior displeasing, the writings of the Jesuits, as shown in the letter to Barreda, supported the measures of the treaty. Thus, it was understood that they either had to obey or suffer the consequences. The Relación del Padre Bernardo Nusdorffer sobre el plan de la mudanza de los 7 pueblos, desde septiembre de 1750 hasta fines de 1755 (Account of Father Bernardo Nusdorffer regarding the plan to move the 7 settlements, from September 1750 through the end of 1755) (1755), may be the one to reveal the implications of native obedience at the reductions. Nusdorffer (1686–1762) describes the activities in the missionary territory. Pragmatic in his role as Superior in charge of the reductions,7 he instructs on how the move will be carried out, the difference between the time given (1 year), the minimum time needed to carry it out (3 years), and the new settlement for each town. In the text, the land per se recovers the central role it had somehow lost through the primacy that the economic aspect had gained by means of the encomiendas and the religious one by the reductions. The Jesuit historian states that, although “it was clear that moving out seemed strange to them,” “se veía que la intimación a la mudanza les era cosa muy extraña” (Nusdorffer 1755, 142), the natives’ initial response was that of obedience. Upon the Superior’s question about where they wanted to settle, the answers reflected the complexities of the moment and their own knowledge of the territory. It was not an easy answer considering the characteristics of the land, the vulnerability of its frontiers in the event of an attack from indigenous or European enemies, and at the same time the memory of the previous cession and annexation orders of plots of land. This last matter was addressed by the Jesuits because the terms of the treaty were not clear and it was important for the missions affected. Which conditions—apart from freedom, extension and potentiality—should the newly chosen lands have? The Indians, disoriented by the Father Superior’s question, appeal to their history in the territory, thus seeking to restore the path traced by their ancestors. For example, those from San Borja wanted to go to their grandparents’ mate plantations, but this was not recommended due to the proximity to Río Grande and, therefore, to the Portuguese.The people of San Miguel proposed a return to the site where their village had once been before their ancestors fled from the Portuguese, but the number of families that made up the current village made it unfeasible. It was challenging to decide where to settle given constant threats faced in the new territories, which explained the affective memory of the places they had left behind. It was not difficult to reject the relocation order on behalf of the monarch and the Jesuits. This is the context that steered the rebellion. Actions by the Luisistas were emblematic of the seven settlements, they moved forward and backward once and again due to the presence of the Charrúas, whose force in the region could not be ignored. Because of the Charrúas, they returned to the reduction. Their hesitation and constant movement were also political. Even when the Luisistas maintained that “they did not excuse themselves from complying with the king’s will,” “no se excusaban con esto de cumplir la voluntad del rey” (Nusdorffer 1755, 179) such persistence in the old missions would be understood by the Crown as contempt, which would have to be punished, therefore, causing a war. Concrete acts in the region in conflict included the withdrawal and holding of a place of their own, and the political nature granted to the land. During the missionary period these actions seem to have been blurred. This happened because the Jesuit-Guaraní militia functioned as the only shock force of the Crown in the Río de la Plata, and it marked a difference with respect to other indigenous militia in other parts of America (Ganson 2003).That reaction was maintained by the Guaraní not only in terms of royal obedience, but mainly in relation to the previous actions of the Portuguese and other indigenous partialities toward them. The logic of tribal revenge was then coming into play, re-signifying war action. Thus, the movement over the 354

Space, movement and writing

land—conceived many times as their own—is once again significant; the situation no longer entails a withdrawal or defense only, but a reappropriation. If the king deprives the Guaraní of their place to defend the territory and make the land an item for negotiation, then the natives will establish that the land is not up for negotiation in all of their letters and statements.They will declare that the land has an owner and a value, the result of their generations of labor: For them, what was previously declared by the king does not become undone by a treaty which, on the other hand, was still highly improbable: You see here what our saint King Felipe V communicated to us in 1716. Take good care of my land and of yourselves, do not let your enemies and my enemies do you any harm. (…) I will certainly not take you away from your land or will trouble you in anyway (…). Because this is what the king wrote to us, we the caciques of San Juan and other Indians do not believe [the request from the treaty]. We have not been conquered by any Spaniard, it was because of the Fathers’ message and way of thinking that we became vassals of your king. [Ves aquí lo que nuestro santo Rey Felipe V nos avisó el año 1716. Cuidad muy bien mi tierra y también de vosotros mismos, que no os hagan mal vuestros enemigos mis enemigos. (…) Yo ciertamente no os sacaré de vuestra tierra ni tampoco os molestaré en cosa alguna. (…) Por esto que el Rey nos escribió, nosotros los caciques de San Juan y los demás indios no creemos. Nosotros no hemos sido conquistados por español alguno, por razón y palabra de los Padres nos hicimos vasallos de vuestro Rey.] (Caciques e indios del pueblo de San Juan al gobernador de Buenos Aires, José de Andonaegui. San Juan, 16 de julio de 1753. (Mateos 1949; Meliá 1997) The Guaraní writings are powerful and eloquent.The issue in the letters is not the commitment to obey the King as vassals but rather, that “they could not persuade themselves that the king, having promised them the lands, now wanted to pass on their ownership to their enemies” (Cortesão 1969, 133). The only way to explain this nonsense was that the king had been deceived. “Who would believe this?—Henis asks himself—that the Indians might find themselves in such a state and in such a situation that, in order to serve the king and to be loyal to him, it is necessary to take up arms against the king himself.” (“¿Quién creyera esto?—se pregunta Henis—Que las cosas de los indios estén en tal estado y se hallen en tal situación que, para servir al Rey y prestarle fidelidad, sea necesario tomar contra el mismo Rey las armas”) ([1754] 1836, 542). The Guaraní defense of the land was not an act of rebellion but the absolute opposite, especially if we consider the Guaraní’s loyalty and role in protecting the Spanish territory, which they intended to continue exercising. They had consciously chosen to become subjects accepting all the responsibilities entailed in vassalage to the Spanish Crown. One important aspect of the Guaraní rebellion is their use of writing.These vassals “by reason and speech” began to write letters, testimonies, and reports of the sort that demonstrate their understanding of the power of writing (Jara and Spadaccini 1992). By writing, the caciques discovered the function of epistolary exchanges, which until then had been a prerogative of the friars or the notarial secretaries (Neumann 2000b, 164).Writing letters became a key weapon for defense and attack, a strategic element of battle. As Henis writes “mail flew from town to town,” reproducing a spatial itinerary with their own political-territorial content. Letters and missives— whether between the leaders of the various indigenous groups or addressed to the governors in office—made writing a means of negotiation and decision about the Guaraní-Jesuit territory. 355

Loreley El Jaber

Once the caciques understood the value and power of written discourse, letters sent to Spanish governors, Jesuits, and Portuguese colonists began to be intercepted, opened, and read (particularly those with the official seal) to be concealed or destroyed (Neumann 2004; Neumann and Wilde 2014). The Guaraní archive emerged around this event: the traumatic concession of lands to the Portuguese after the Treaty of Madrid. Writing began to be used for the defense of territorial space, which defined their native identity—threatened by the events and imperial mandate affecting the Jesuit missions. Discursive practices were used to describe and defend native spaces; geography (“writing of the earth”) constituted an identitary discourse and instrument to protect and fight for contested territories. In this protean moment, the Guaraní, by their actions inscribed themselves in the territory—they were the embodiment of the territory, as a metaphor, which represented the cultivated land that they had been defending for generations. Bernardo Nusdorffer states that Miguelista Indians went out to observe and report on the campaigns. Upon examining the trace of the surveyors, they found “two stone columns built with the coat of arms of the two crowns and looking at them very slowly the Indians finally knocked them down saying that because they had the Portuguese arms, they should not be in these places” (1969, 199). Please note the defensive role, the suppression of this function breaks to some extent the military alliance with the Jesuits, as well as their identity as reduced Indians who lost an important role they had been granted. The statement by the Indian chief San Juan still resonates: “We have not been conquered by any Spaniard, because of the priests we have become vassals of your King.” Indigenous communities were there to move the columns and “defend them for Spain, as they have defended them until now [because] these were their lands since the beginning of the world and God had given them and his grandparents were buried there” (Nusdorffer 1969, 199). For San Juan, Spain, the king, and the presence of the Guaraní ancestors all play an equal role in legitimating the native’s actions. Physical movement and migration per se restored the ancestral value of the land; thus, empowering the Guaraní people to identify their “true” enemy, the Portuguese. The unidirectional flow of empire was broken (Brückner 2003; Doyle 1986; Kumar 2017), yet the bond with the Jesuits shaped by the missionary experience marked their identities. The Jesuits moved, yet the Guaraní returned to their ancestral territory, that same space that had been appropriated for the original missions and from which the native rebellion was launched. After learning about the power of letters for legal disputes, natives began to write about their rights to the land, therefore inscribing in writing their territoriality (Mignolo 1986). These are the cultural transactions surrounding the uprising and final resolution of the Guaraní defense of the territory. In this context, we must examine these events and the subsequent attack by European forces to quell the only rebellion of its kind in the region of La Plata.

Conclusions Under Spanish rule, the spatial construction of the La Plata region has been defined by futile entradas (the Spanish expeditions of exploration and plunder), the founding of colonies and settlements, depopulation, forward and backward journeys, and the creation and dismantling of frontiers.Thus, one can expose a complex history of these entanglements revealing multiple cultural, political, religious, and economic factors. Its territorial specificity and geographical imaginary collided with the natives’ attachment to their territory and resistance. The history of resistance cannot be told without unlikely alliances that were formed around mutual interests. All of the protagonists—Mendoza and Ayolas, Irala and Cabeza de Vaca, the Guaraní

356

Space, movement and writing

women, and all the Guaraníes at the missions—configured space through their respective struggles: rebellions over the land, Jesuit undertakings before and after the treaty of Madrid, Spanish settlements, Spanish and Portuguese disputes over a frontier in their struggle for expansion, the acquisition of wealth, and the development of commerce. Their spatial envisioning of the territory was enabled by the mobility of bodies—identities and ideologies in motion forged space. As Milton Santos says, “Space consists of a series of object systems and action systems that is at once indissoluble and mutually binding, and at the same time contradictory” (2006, 39, emphasis added). The multifaceted textuality of the colonial experience conflated these interrelated processes to describe the workings of colonialism in the La Plata Region.

Notes 1 All translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated. 2 The Jesuit province of Paraguay in 1604 encompassed a vast territory in what are now Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay, and parts of Bolivia, Chile and Brazil. 3 The killing of four Jesuits who sought to establish some of the first missions early in the seventeenth century is an example of the Guaraní resistance to missionization (Altuna 2014; Hernandéz 1913). In his report about the the first reductions, the Jesuit missionary Antonio Ruiz de Montoya ([1639] 1892, 58) distinguishes between the Guaraní who were easily reduced from those who were not. Rebelling against the Jesuits, the cacique Miguel Artiguayé labeled the priests as “demons from hell” sent to decimate his people by forbidding polygamy. 4 The Portuguese vied for Jesuit territory because of the bodies (for labor) and natural wealth provided by that space. Furthermore, the missions offered a vantage point to access the mines of Potosí, the Banda Oriental’s livestock, and the port of Buenos Aires. The Portuguese aimed for the western part of the Río Uruguay because of its population, livestock and imagined wealthy mines (Quarleri 2009). With the negotiations leading to the 1750 Treaty of Madrid, Portugal received most of the Jesuit territories. 5 To acces to a broader vision of the geographic imaginery of the Jesuits, see Furlong 1936. 6 The treaty acknowledged lands that were already occupied by Portugal in the current Brazilian states of Paraná and Río Grande do Sul, and from Spain the Banda Oriental, where Montevideo was originally founded. It also granted exclusive navigation of the Río de la Plata to the Portuguese. 7 Nusdorffer was Superior General of all the Guaraní reductions during 1732–1739 and 1747–1752. Between 1743 and 1747 he was the Provincial of all the Jesuit Province of Paraguay, Río de la Plata and Tucumán. From his arrival in 1717 until his death in 1762, he dedicated his efforts to preserve Guaraní settlements and to keep their culture intact (Furlong 1971).

Works cited Adorno, Rolena, and Patrick Pautz. 1999. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, 3 vols. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Altuna, Elena. 2014. “Los contactos interétnicos y sus representaciones en los escritos de la Conquista Espiritual.” In Historia crítica de la Literatura Argentina. Vol. 1, 387-415, edited by Cristina Iglesia and Loreley El Jaber. Buenos Aires: Emecé. Arias, Santa, and Mariselle Meléndez, eds. 2002. Mapping Colonial Spanish America. Places and Commonplaces of Identity, Culture and Experience. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Assadourian, Carlos Sempat. 1992. “La conquista.” In Argentina: De la conquista a la independencia, edited by Carlos Sempat Assadourian, Guillermo Beato, and José C. Chiaramonte, 13–114. Buenos Aires: Paidós. Asúa, Miguel de. 2014. Science in the Vanished Arcadia: Knowledge of Nature in the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay and Río de la Plata. Leiden: Brill. Avellaneda, Mercedes, and Lía Quarleri. 2007. “Las milicias guaraníes en el Paraguay y Río de la Plata: Alcances y limitaciones (1649–1756).” Estudios Ibero-Americanos 33 (1): 109–132. Barcelos, Artur. 2000. “Os jesuitas e a ocupação do espaço platino nos séculos XVII e XVIII.” Revista Complutense de Historia de América 26: 93–116.

357

Loreley El Jaber Bauer, Ralph. 2003. The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures. Empire, Travel, Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brückner, Martin. 2003.“The Critical Place of Empire in Early American Studies.” American Literary History 15 (4): 809–821. Centenera, Martín del Barco. [1602] 1998. Argentina y Conquista del Río de la Plata. Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires. Cortesão, Jaime, ed. 1969. “Do Tratado de Madrí á Conquista dos Sete Povos (1750–1802).” In Manuscritos da Coleção De Angelis, 7th ed. Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional. Cosgrove, Denis. 1989. “Geography is Everywhere: Culture and Symbolism in Human Landscapes.” In Horizons in Human Geography, edited by Derek Gregory and Rex Walford, 118–135. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Díaz de Guzmán, Ruy. [1612] 1974. La Argentina. Buenos Aires: Huemul. Doyle, Michael. 1986. Empires. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. El Jaber, Loreley. 2001. “Asunción: El paraíso de Mahoma o la Sodoma del Plata.” Latin American Literary Review 29 (58): 101–112. ———. 2011. Un país malsano. La conquista del espacio en las crónicas del Río de la Plata (siglos XVI y XVII). Rosario, AR: Beatriz Viterbo. ———. 2014. “Primeras imágenes del Río de la Plata. Colonialismo, viaje y escritura en los siglos XVI y XVII.” In Historia crítica de la Literatura Argentina. “Una patria literaria,” edited by Cristina Iglesia and Loreley El Jaber, 23–57. Buenos Aires: Emecé. Furlong, Guillermo S. J. 1936. Cartografía jesuítica del Río de la Plata. Buenos Aires: Talleres S.A. Casa Jacobo Peuser. ———. 1971. Bernardo Nusdorffer y su “Novena Parte.” Escritores Coloniales Rioplatenses 22. Buenos Aires: Ed. Theoria. Ganson, Barbara. 2003. The Guaraní under Spanish Rule in the Río de la Plata. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gregory, Derek. 1998. Geographical Imaginations. Oxford: Blackwell. Henis, Tadeo. [1754] 1836. Diario histórico de la rebelión y guerra de los pueblos guaraníes situados en la costa ­oriental del Río Uruguay del año 1754. Vol. 5 of Colección de obras y documentos relativos a la historia antigua y moderna de las provincias del Río de la Plata, edited by Pedro de Angelis, 447–563. Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Estado. Hernandéz, Pablo. 1913. Misiones del Paraguay. Organización social de las doctrinas guaraníes de la Compañía de Jesús. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili Editor. Hernández, Pero. [1545] 1906. “Relación de las cosas sucedidas en el Río de la Plata.” In Colección de libros y documentos referentes a la Historia de América, edited by Manuel Serrano y Sanz, 308–358. Madrid: Victoriano Suárez. Iglesia, Cristina. 1987. “Conquista y mito blanco.” In Cautivas y misioneros: mitos blancos de la Conquista, edited by Cristina Iglesia and Julio Schvartzman, 11–89. Buenos Aires: Catálogos Editora. Jara, René, and Nicholas Spadaccini, eds. 1992. 1492–1992: Re/Discovering Colonial Writing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Kelen, Christopher. 2007. An Introduction to Rhetorical Terms. Phisolophy Insights. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks. Kern, Arno Álvarez. 1982. Missões: uma utopia política. Porto Alegre, BR: Mercado Aberto. Kumar, Krishan. 2017. Vision of Empire. How Five Imperial Regimes Shaped the World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Malden: Blackwell. Martínez de Irala, Domingo de. [1541] 1898. “La relación que dejó Domingo Martínez de Irala en Buenos Aires al tiempo que la despobló.” In Boletín del Instituto Geográfico Argentino. Vol. 19, 262-263. Buenos Aires: Imprenta “La Buenos Aires.” ———. [1556] 1941. “Relación escrita por el gobernador Domingo Martínez de Irala, al marqués de Mondejar, Luis Huratado de Mendoza, presidented el Consejo Real de las Indias.” In Documentos históricos y geográficos relativos a la conquista y colonización rioplatense.Vol. 2, 481-483. Buenos Aires: Talleres Casa Jacobo Peuser. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mateos, Francisco. 1949. “Cartas de indios cristianos del Paraguay.” Missionalia Hispánica 6 (18): 547–572. Meliá, Bartolomeu. 1997. El guaraní conquistado y reducido. Ensayos de etnohistoria. Asuncion, PY: Universidad Católica de Nuestra Señora de Asunción.

358

Space, movement and writing ———. 2006. “Escritos guaraníes como fuentes documentales de la historia paraguaya.” Nuevo Mundo/ Mundos Nuevos. Débats. http://journals.openedition.org/nuevomundo/2193 Mendoza, Pedro de [1537] 1941. “Instrucción que el adelantado don Pedro de Mendoza dejó a nombre de Juan de Ayolas, cuando se embarcó con destino a España.” In Documentos históricos y geográficos relativos a la conquista y colonización rioplatense, edited by José Torre Revello,Vol. 2. Buenos Aires: Comisión Nacional del IV Centenario de la Fundación de Buenos Aires, Casa de Jacobo Peuser. Mignolo, Walter. 1986. “La lengua, la letra, el territorio (o la crisis de los estudios literarios coloniales).” Dispositio 11 (28–29): 137–160. Motoukias, Zacarías. 2000. “Gobierno y Sociedad en el Tucumán y el Río de la Plata, 1550–1800.” In Nueva Historia Argentina: La sociedad colonial, edited by Enrique Tandeter, 355–411.Vol. 2. Buenos Aires: Sudamericana. Neumann, Eduardo. 2000a. “A lança e as cartas: escrita indígena e conflito nas reduçoes do Paraguai-século XVIII.” História Unisinos 11 (2): 160–172. ———. 2000b. “Fronteira e identatidade: confrontos luso-guarani na Banda Oriental 1680- 1757.” Revista Complutense de Historia de América 26: 73-92. ———. 2004. “‘Mientras volaban correos por los pueblos’: autogoverno e práticas letradas nas missões Guaraní-século XVIII.” Horizontes Antropológicos 10 (22): 93–119. Neumann, Eduardo, and Guillermo Wilde. 2014. “Escritura, poder y memoria en las reducciones jesuíticas del Paraguay: trayectorias de líderes indígenas en tiempos de transición.” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 2 (3): 353–380. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar. [1545] 1906. “Relación general que yo, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Adelantado y Gobernador general de la provincia del rrio de la Plata, por merced de Su Majestad, hago para le ynformar, y á los señores de su RReal Consejo de Indias, de las cosas subcedidas en la dicha provincia dende que por su mandato partí destos reynos a socorrer y conquistar la dicha provincia.” In Colección de libros y documentos referentes a la historia de América, edited by Manuel Serrano y Sanz.Vol. 6, 1–98. Madrid: Biblioteca General Victoriano Suárez. ———. [1555] 1985. Naufragios y Comentarios. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. Nusdorffer, Bernardo. [1755] 1969. “Relação do padre Bernardo Nusdorffer sobre o plano de mudança dos 7 povos, desde setembro de 1750 até fins de 1755.” In Do Tratado de Madrí à Conquista dos Sete Povos (1750–1802), edited by Jaime Cortesão. Manuscritos da Coleção De Angelis 7, 139–300. Rio de Janeiro: Peña, Enrique. 1904. La despoblación de Buenos Aires en 1541. Buenos Aires: Imprenta, Litografía y Encuadernación de Jacobo Peuser. Quarleri, Lía. 2009. Rebelión y guerra en las fronteras del Plata. Guaraníes, jesuitas e imperios coloniales. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Ramírez, Luis. 1941. Carta de Luis Ramírez, 10 de julio, 1528. In Documentos históricos y geográficos relativos a la conquista y colonización rioplatense, edited by José Torre Revello, 91–106. Vol. 1. Buenos Aires: Comisión Nacional del IV Centenario de la Fundación de Buenos Aires. Rojas, Ricardo. 1960. Historia de la literatura argentina.Vol. 3. Buenos Aires: Kraft. Roulet, Florencia. 1993. La resistencia de los guaraní del Paraguay a la conquista española (1537–1556). Posadas, AR: Universidad Nacional de Misiones. Ruiz de Montoya, Antonio. [1639] 1892. Conquista espiritual hecha por los religiosos de la Compañía de Jesús en las provincias del Paraguay, Uruguay y Tape. Bilbao, ES: Editorial Corazón de Jesús. Salas, Alberto. 1960. Crónica florida del mestizaje de las Indias. Siglo XVI. Buenos Aires: Losada. Santos, Milton. 2006. A Naturaleza do Espaço.Técnica e Tempo. Razão e Emoção. 4th ed. São Paulo, BR: Editora da Universidade de São Paulo. Sarreal, Julia. 2014. The Guaraní and Their Missions: A Socioeconomic History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Schmidl, Ulrico (Utz). [1567] 2016. Derrotero y viaje a España y las Indias. Parana, AR: Universidad Nacional de Entre Ríos. Susnik, Branislava. 1975. Dispersión Tupí-Guaraní prehistórica: Ensayo analítico. Asunción: Museo Etnográfico Andrés Barbero. Verdesio, Gustavo. 2001. Forgotten Conquests: Rereading New World History from the Margins. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Wilde, Guillermo. 2009. Religión y poder en las misiones guaraníes. Buenos Aires: Editorial SB.

359

PART IV

Language, translation and beyond

21 THE WHITE LEGEND El Dorado, pachacuti, and Walter Raleigh’s discovery of (Latin) America Ralph Bauer

In the last paragraph of his The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtifvl Empyre of Gviana (1596), Walter Raleigh reports that, during the time of the Spanish conquest of Peru, an ancient prophecy was found in one of the main temples at Cuzco that foretold not only the fall of the old Inca capital to the Spaniards but also the Incas’ eventual delivery from the Spanish colonial yoke as well as their restoration as the legitimate lords over their former dominion. This restoration of the “Inga” would be brought about by men from “Inglatierra,” and had, Raleigh averred, already begun with his own expedition up the Orinoco River the year before (1595), when he searched for “Manoa,” a fabulously rich city rumored to be located in the remote interiors of the South American jungle. For, Raleigh explains, this “Inga” was none other than the legendary “El Dorado,” the king of Manoa who had received his Spanish name for his fabled practice of an annual initiation rite during which he completely covered himself with gold dust and submerged in a lake (see Figure 21.1). If this Inca Dorado had hitherto remained elusive, Raleigh appealed to his queen to “give order for the rest, and either defend it, and hold it as tributary, or conquer and keep it as empress of the same” (Raleigh [1596] 1997, 199). Despite Raleigh’s ardent appeal, however, Queen Elizabeth did not invest in his adventure to discover El Dorado; and his own subsequent attempts, as well as those of his lieutenant, Lawrence Keymis, remained as unsuccessful as had been the previous Spanish endeavors. The several tons of ore that he brought back to London from his first voyage to Guiana and that he thought to be rich in gold, turned out to be worthless. Worse, Raleigh’s second expedition to Guiana some twenty years later (1617) ended in the death of his son, in Keymis’s suicide, and, ultimately, in his own execution (in 1618) for the illegal attack that his lieutenant had launched against a Spanish garrison, defying King James’ explicit order to honor the peace treaty with Spain. But for all these disasters, Raleigh’s Discoverie was arguably a success in at least one respect—not as a historical chronicle of an actual English discovery and conquest but as a rhetorical artifact that legitimated the idea of an English discovery—the discovery of a golden America that had not yet been discovered and conquered by Spain but had remained hidden.1 In its dependence on the rhetoric of the “Black Legend”—the notion of the extraordinary

363

Ralph Bauer

Figure 21.1  M  atthäus Becker,Wie der Keyser auss Guaiana seine Edelleut pflegt zu zurichten wenn er sie zu Gast helt. In [America. Pt 8. German] Americae achter Theil. In welchem erstlich beschrieben wirt das Mächtige und Goldtreiche Königreich Guiana [etc.]. Frankfurt am Main, 1599. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI.

cruelty and injustice of the Spanish conquest of America—Raleigh’s claim for an English discovery might be called the “White Legend,” the notion that this secret America was a virgin land that, like his “virgin queen” Elizabeth, had not yet been raped by Spaniards but had saved her “maidenhead” (as he put it) to be discovered by English redeemers (Raleigh [1596] 1997, 196). This White Legend would become the dominant ideology underwriting the English colonial project in the later conquest of “Virginia” and the so-called New World more broadly. In this mythology of American beginnings, Anglo Americans see themselves as the heirs not of Hernando Cortés the conqueror but of Christopher Columbus the discoverer. Thus, still in the twentieth century, the famous Anglo-American historian Daniel Boorstin declared that “My hero is Man the Discoverer…the world we now view from the literate West…had to be opened for us by countless Columbuses…. All the world is still an America” (Boorstin 1985, 8, xv–xvi). Even to this day, Columbus Day is celebrated but not Cortés Day in the United States, even though the former never came any closer than the latter to a territory that would later become part of that nation.2 This chapter explores the origins of this White Legend by focusing on Raleigh’s account of his search for the legendary Dorado. As I will argue, the idea of an English discovery in (Latin) America originates in Raleigh’s text as an act not of invention but of translation and appropriation.3 Modern scholars have often read the sixteenth-century literary record about the search for El Dorado in terms of a European projection of classical myths and medieval alchemical 364

The white legend

fantasies upon an American terra incognita (see Gandía 1946, 125–127; Harlow 1928; Ramos Pérez 1973; Nicholl 1995; Burnett, 2000). Raleigh’s Discoverie, in particular, has hereby been seen as an act of rhetorical conquest—as “writing that conquers”—within a New Historicist critical paradigm predicated on the insight that America was not discovered but “invented” by Europeans in the early modern period.4 But while New Historicist critics have rightly approached the El Dorado corpus with a hermeneutics of suspicion, it would be a mistake to read these texts solely in terms of European impositions and projections. Indeed, modern anthropologists have established that the El Dorado legend has a basis not only in European classical mythology and medieval alchemy but also in Native South American oral traditions about an actual cultural practice among the Muisca (or Chibcha), an Indian tribe living in the highlands of Bogotá.5 From this point of view, the legend of El Dorado might be described as an example of what Serge Gruzinski has called a “mestizo mechanism,” an intercultural hybrid that fused various European and indigenous traditions in colonial situations (Gruzinski 2002, 49). In a similar vein, Neil Whitehead has described Raleigh’s Discoverie as a text that is both “enchanted” and “ethnological” thus meriting serious consideration not only in literary but also in ethnohistorical scholarship. But while Whitehead (an anthropologist) was primarily interested in distilling ethnological information from Raleigh’s text, I wish to ask here how its “enchanted” and “ethnological” hermeneutics interacted during the early modern period in the making of new scientific and imperialist ideologies. As we will see, Raleigh’s claim about a prophecy of the restoration of the “Inga” by “Inglatierra” had its roots partially in ethnological knowledge he had cunningly obtained, translated, manipulated, and synthesized from his Spanish literary sources as well as from the intelligence extracted from local Indians and Spanish officials. In particular, Raleigh’s rather extraordinary claim suggests that he was familiar with the Andean apocalyptic tradition of pachacuti, the Turner of the Earth. In Raleigh’s translation and appropriation of this tradition, the English “discovery” of El Dorado becomes the fulfillment of this Inca prophecy— the delivery of the Incas from the Spanish yoke by an English pachacuti. Raleigh’s dialog with his Spanish sources in the Discoverie may thus be seen as yet another example to show that it is impossible to understand early modern writing about America within the discrete terms of national languages and literary histories, as the so-called European Age of Discovery was also (and perhaps primarily) a transnational Age of Translation (see Marroquín-Arredondo and Bauer 2019, 1–26; Bauer 2019; Bauer 2003; and Greene 1999). The next section of this chapter will provide some basic background on the so-called Black Legend upon which Raleigh’s White Legend of the English discovery of El Dorado depended. The remainder of the chapter will explore the textual lineages of Raleigh’s translation of the tradition of pachacuti from his Spanish American and indigenous sources.

The Black and the Gold Legend The Spanish conquest of America was remarkable in the long history of human warfare and plunder not for its now proverbial cruelty and avarice but for the significant controversy it sparked—perhaps for the first time—within an expanding imperialist culture about the justness of subjecting others to one’s faith and way of life by the force of arms. By most accounts, this controversy began on the island of Hispaniola on the fourth Sunday of Advent, December 21, 1511, when the newly arrived Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos preached a sermon in which he excoriated the Spanish conquerors and colonists for their abuses of the Indians they held in subjection. Among Montesinos’ audience was a secular priest named Bartolomé de Las Casas, in whom the sermon appears to have triggered a conversion experience that led him to join the Dominican order in 1513 and become the most vociferous advocate for the rights of 365

Ralph Bauer

the American Indians as well as one of the harshest critics of the Spanish conquest and the colonial system set up in America. In 1534, Las Casas published his De unico vocationis modo, in which he argued that “the only way” of conversion was by peaceful means. God had permitted Christopher Columbus to discover America for Spain, he argued, not so that individual colonists could enrich themselves at the expense of the Indians but so that the Indians could be converted peacefully to the only saving faith. In 1552, Las Casas published his Brevíssima relación de la destrucción de las indias, a most graphic indictment of the cruelty of the Spanish conquest that was, in its hyperbolic rhetoric, calculated to lend support to his lifelong struggle to protect the Indians from Spanish abuses and exploitation. There, Las Casas described the Indians as “gentle sheep” (ovejas mansas) who, despite their paganism, had held rightful dominion of their lands and property before the arrival of the Spaniards, who, like “rabid wolves” (rabiosos lobos), had fallen upon the Indians and subjected them to slavery and infernal tyranny (Las Casas 2006, 14, 117). In order to drive home his point, he offered gruesome examples of the conquerors’ cruelty and avarice. For example, he reported that: It once happened that I myself witnessed their grilling of four or five local leaders in this fashion (and I believe they had set up two or three other pairs of grills alongside so that they might process other victims at the same time) when the poor creatures’ howls came between the Spanish commander and his sleep. He gave orders that the prisoners were to be throttled, but the man in charge of the execution detail, who was more bloodthirsty than the average hangman (I know his identity and even met some of his relatives in Seville), was loath to cut short his private entertainment by throttling them and so he personally went around ramming wooden bungs into their mouths to stop them making such a racket and deliberately stoked the fire so that they would take just as long to die as he himself chose. I saw all these things for myself and many others besides. (Las Casas 1992, 15–16) Una vez vide que teniendo en las parrillas quemándose quatro, o cinco principales y señores (y aún pienso que avía dos, o tres pares de parrillas donde quemavan otros) y porque davan muy grandes gritos y davan pena al capitán, o le impidían el sueño, mandó que los ahogassen, y el alguazil que era peor que verdugo que los quemava (y sé cómo se llamava y aún sus parientes conocí en Sevilla) no quiso ahogallos, antes les metió con sus mano palos en las bocas para que no sonassen, y atizóles el fuego hasta que se asaron de espacio como él quería.Yo vide todas las cosas arriba dichas y muchas otras infinitas. (Las Casas 2006, 20) The conquerors had given the Christian faith such a bad name in America, Las Casas charged, that when a Native leader, named Hatuey, was told by a Franciscan missionary that he would never reach heaven but have to endure “everlasting torment” in hell lest he converted, he asked whether Christians went to Heaven. When the reply came that good ones do, he retorted, without need for further reflection, that, if that was the case, then he chose to go to Hell to ensure that he would never again have to clap eyes on those cruel brutes. This is just one example of the reputation and honor that our Lord and our Christian faith have earned as a result of the actions of those “Christians” who have sailed to the Americas. (Las Casas 1992, 28–29) 366

The white legend

[si iban cristianos al cielo. El religioso le respondió que sí, pero que iban los que eran buenos. Dijo luego el cacique, sin más pensar, que no quería él ir allá, sino al infierno, por no estar donde estuviesen y por no ver tan cruel gente. Ésta es la fama y honra que Dios y nuestra fe ha ganado con los cristianos que han ido a las Indias.] (Las Casas 2006, 37–39) While Las Casas generally refrained from naming the Spaniards whose crimes he exposed, he singled out for their special cruelty the German agents of the Welser who, in 1526, had been granted a colony in Venezuela by Charles V in repayment for the large sums of money that the German bankers had loaned him for bribing the German dukes who elected him to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire in 1519. From their base at Coro, the Welsers’ agents launched their search for El Dorado and the Pacific Ocean, a quest that brought one of their leaders, Nikolaus Federmann to the highlands of Bogotá, where he met with Sebastián de Belalcázar and Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada in 1539, who had also been searching for the fabled city. Outdoing the Spanish conquerors in their cruelty and greed, the Germans in Venezuela were “more inhumane and more vicious than savage tigers,” Las Casas wrote, “more ferocious than lions or ravening wolves” (Las Casas 1992, 96) (“más irracional y furiosamente que crudelísimos tigres y que rabiosos lobos y leones” [Las Casas 2006, 117]). In his mad quest for El Dorado, one of the German commanders took with him a vast number of native bearers, shackled together and each weighed down by a load of three of four arrobas. Whenever one of these poor wretches fainted from hunger or became too exhausted to carry on, they cut his head from his body at the point where the iron collar bound him to his companions, so as not to have to waste time unshackling him from the bearers to either side of him; his head would fall to one side and his decapitated body to the other, and his load would then be distributed among his fellows, adding to their already heavy burdens. (Las Casas 1992, 99) [llevó él y los demás infinitos indios cargados con cargas de tres y cuatro arrobas, ensartados en cadenas. Cansábase alguno o desmayaba de hambre y del trabajo y flaqueza; cortábanle luego la cabeza por la collera de la cadena, por no pararse a desensartar los otros que iban en las colleras de más afuera; y caía la cabeza a una parte y el cuerpo a otra, y repartían la carga déste sobre las que llevaban los otros.] (Las Casas 2006, 121) Such were the “outrages committed against God and against divine law …[by] the inhumanity of these Swabian—or more properly, swinish—butchers” (Las Casas, 1992, 101). (“los daños, deshonras, blasfemias, infamias de Dios y de su ley, … por la cudicia y inmanidad de aquestos tiranos animales o alemanes” [Las Casas, 2006, 123]). But despite his (misleading) insinuations that these Germans may have been Lutherans (1992, 98; 2006, 120), Las Casas had made the conquerors’ cruelties and avarice proverbial not only in the Spanish Empire but also abroad, especially among Protestant nations. Thus, his Brevíssma relación was quickly translated into multiple European languages, including Dutch, French, Latin, and German.6 In England, there were two early modern editions, one published under Queen Elizabeth I’s reign in 1583 as The Spanish Colonie and another one during the seventeenth-­ century Interregnum as The Tears of the Indians (1656). The latter was published with illustrations that were adapted from the copperplate engravings that had embellished Theodor De Bry’s Latin 367

Ralph Bauer

Figure 21.2  [ Native Americans hanged over a fire] Bartolomé de Las Casas, Narratio regionum indicarum per Hispanos quosdam deuastatarum verissima. Francofurti [Frankfurt am Main]: Theodor de Bry & Johann Sauer, 1598. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

edition, entitled Narratio regionum indicarum per Hispanos quosdam deuastatarum verissima and published at Frankfurt in 1598. That same edition also included graphic images of the hunt for El Dorado, showing the torture and murder of chief Bogotá at the hands of several Spaniards for having failed to supply a house of gold, as had been demanded of him (see Figures 21.2 and 21.3). The first English edition of 1583 was translated anonymously by a “M.M.S” from a French version by Jacques de Miggrode and published by Thomas Dawson for William Brome in London. In a preface addressed to the reader, the anonymous translator suggested that the Spanish nation was genetically predisposed to barbaric violence that they perpetrated in the Americas due to its dual Gothic and Moorish (Muslim) ancestry in Europe. behold so many millions of men put to death, as hardly there have been so many Spaniards procreated into this world since their first fathers the Gothes inhabited their countries, either since their second progenitors the Saracens expelled and murdered the most part of the Gothes, as it seemeth that the Spaniardes haue murdered and put to death in the Westerne Indies by all such meanes as barbarousnesse it selfe coulde imagine or forge vpon the anueld of crueltie. They haue destroyed thrise so much lande as christendome doth comprehende: such torments haue they inuented, yea so great and excessiue haue their trecherie been, that the posteritie shall hardly thinke that euer so barbarous or cruell a nation haue bin in the worlde, if as you woulde say we had not with our eyes seene it, and with our hands felt it. I confesse that I neuer 368

The white legend

Figure 21.3  [ The torture of King Bogotá]. Bartolomé de Las Casas, Narratio regionum indicarum per Hispanos quosdam deuastatarum verissima. Francofurti [Frankfurt am Main]: Theodor de Bry & Johann Sauer, 1598. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

loued that nation generally, by reason of their intollerable pride, notwithstanding I can not but cōmend & loue sundry excellent persons that are among thē. (Las Casas 1583, f. 2) By the last decade of the sixteenth century, the stereotype of the cruel conqueror of America—a stereotype that in Las Casas had transcended national boundaries to designate all false Christians—had become associated with a distinctly Spanish national character as medieval (“gothic”) and only partially Christian, which is to say adulterated by Moorish Islam. This stereotype would become a persistent foil in the formation of national identities in Protestant Europe during the seventeenth century and of an Enlightenment philosophy of race, progress, and modernity emerging during the eighteenth century. Still during the nineteenth century, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel would famously refer to Spaniards as “the Africans of Europe” (Hegel [1827] 1989, 88).

The Black and the White Legend Raleigh’s The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtifvl Empyre of Gviana was a seminal text in the history of the Black Legend in England and on the Continent. After its original English edition in 1596, it was republished in both Latin and German by Theodore de Bry as Part Eight of his “America” series in 1599. The same year, it was also published in a separate German edition by 369

Ralph Bauer

Levinus Hulsius in the Protestant city of Nuremberg under the title Kurtze wunderbare Beschreibung. Dess Goldreichen Königreichs Guianae im America, oder newen Welt, vnter der Linea Aequinoctiali gelegen.The preface of this edition placed Raleigh’s text in the tradition of the books of wonders and prodigies, featuring Amazons as well as monstrous races without heads and their faces in their trunks. And for good measure, the preface also included the story of a young virgin named Katharina who, until age seven, never ate, defecated, or sweated and yet turned out to be a wellshaped, lively young woman with normal speech. The editor also highlighted the economic potential of Guiana, which boasts of “gold, precious stones, pearls, balsum, oil, pepper, sugar, myrrh, spices, rubber, honey, silk, cotton, and Brazil wood, all of which are to be had from the inhabitants by barter for things such as knives and “things from Nuremberg” (Raleigh 1599, 4). In these translations as well as Raleigh’s original English version, the Black Legend is personified by the Spanish governor of Trinidad, Antonio de Berrío, whom Raleigh had captured and interrogated about his earlier search for El Dorado. Thus, Raleigh reports that every night there came some [of the Indians] with most lamentable complaints of his cruelty: how he had divided the island and given to every soldier a part; that he made the ancient cacique, which were lords of the country, to be their slaves; that he kept them in chains, and dropped their naked bodies with burning bacon, and such other torments, which I found afterwards to be true. (Raleigh 1997, 28) It is Berrío’s cruelty that caused the Indians to withhold their knowledge about the secret location of El Dorado, thus providing an explanation of why it had not yet been discovered by the Spaniards. By contrast, the Indians are most eager to divulge their secrets to Raleigh and become the subjects of Queen Elizabeth, who is the sworn enemy of the Spaniards.Thus, he relates how I made them understand that I was the servant of a queen who was the great cacique of the north, and a virgin, and had more caciqui under her than there were trees in that island; that she was an enemy to the Castellani in respect of their tyranny and oppression, and that she delivered all such nations about her, as were by them oppressed; and having freed all the coast of the northern world from their servitude, had sent me to free them also, and withal to defend the country of Guiana from their invasion and conquest. (Raleigh 1997, 134) As the Indians’ deliverer from the Spanish yoke, Raleigh is rewarded with their disclosure of not only Guiana’s geographic secrets but also their scientific knowledge of the properties of local animals and plants, including their art of preparing a very deadly poison with which they equip their arrows in warfare, and its antidotes. “There was nothing whereof I was more curious,” he wrote, than to finde out the true remedies of these poisoned arrows, for besides the mortalitie of the wound they make, the partie shot indureth the most insufferable torment in the world, and abideth a most uglie and lamentable death, somtimes dying starke mad, somtimes their bowels breaking out of their bellies, and are presently discolored, as blacke as pitch, and so unsavory, as no man can endure to cure, or to attend them. (Raleigh 1997, 170–171)

370

The white legend

This remedy, commonly called curare by the Spaniards, was a mixture prepared from the Strychnos root and bark and the subject of many fables among the European colonists. While it is unclear whether this Native secret was actually disclosed to Raleigh, he makes great rhetorical use of it by emphasizing that he, unlike the Spaniards who failed in their attempts at attaining this knowledge through violent extortions, was able to penetrate this secret. “But every one of these Indians know it not,” he writes, “no not one among thousands, but their southsaiers and priests, who do conceale it, and onely teach it but from the father to the sonne.”Yet, he continues, “I was more beholding to the Guianians, than any other,” and “they told me the best way of healing as well therof, as of all other poisons” (Raleigh 1997, 171). Among these remedies were many plants, minerals, and stones with magical properties, including one that the Natives call takua and that played an important role in Native healing ceremonies and cosmology. Raleigh’s claim in the Discoverie that the Indians have been hiding secret information about El Dorado and the medicinal properties of plants from the Spaniards but are willing to divulge their secrets to the English ‘discoverers’ sheds light on the rhetorical connections more generally between the White Legend of an English discovery, the Golden Legend of a “secret” El Dorado, and the Black Legend of Spanish cruelty. Raleigh argues that the cruelty and illegitimacy of Spanish rule caused the Indians to guard their secrets for discovery by their English friends, who were thus called upon to “defend” Guiana and “hold it as tributary, or conquer and keep it as empress of the same” (Raleigh 1997, 219). This fiction is further enhanced in Raleigh’s text by his mimicry and ventriloquism of Native speech and ideas about the English.Thus, he writes that I shewed them her Majesty’s picture, which they so admired and honored, as it had been easy to have brought them idolatrous thereof.The like and a more large discourse I made to the rest of the nations, both in my passing to Guiana and to those of the borders, so as in that part of the world her Majesty is very famous and admirable; whom they now call Ezrabeta cassipuna aquerewana, which is as much as ‘Elizabeth, the Great Princess, or Greatest Commander’. (Raleigh 1997, 134) Thus, Raleigh emphasizes the cultural and religious affinities between Guiana and England, the Virgin Land and the land of the Virgin Queen. Whereas the Spanish conquest represents in his text a rape of America, the English “discoverie” amounts to a gentle “Platonic embrace” (Nicholl 1995: 289). Like Queen Elizabeth, Guiana hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned, nor wrought; the face of the earth hath not been torn, nor the virtue and salt of the soil spent by manurance. The graves have not been opened for gold, the mines not broken with sledges, nor their images pulled down out of their temples. It hath never been entered by any army of strength, and never conquered or possessed by any Christian prince. (Raleigh [1596] 1997, 196)

Walter Raleigh and pachacuti Raleigh’s original contribution to both the Golden and the Black Legend hereby lies in the connection he makes between the English “Discoverie” of Guiana and the Spanish conquest of Peru. Thus, he maintains that “Inglatierra” will deliver the “Inga” from his cruel Spanish

371

Ralph Bauer

oppressor. In elaborating the idea that El Dorado is none other than the Inca and that his redemption by an English sanifex had been foretold in an ancient prophecy found at Cusco, Raleigh’s text fuses ethnographic information garnered from the Spanish chronicles of the conquest of Peru and from the personal testimonies of various Spanish interlocutors. Raleigh was an avid reader of the Spanish chronicles of the discovery and conquest. Despite his fierce anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish sentiments, he was enchanted with the Spanish dream of the conquest of new worlds. Moreover, for him, the exploitation of American gold was more than a dream; it was the necessity of realpolitik that would ensure English survival in the imperial rivalry with Spain for geopolitical hegemony. Thus, he writes that we find that by the abundant treasure of that country the Spanish king vexes all the princes of Europe, and is become, in a few years, from a poor king of Castile, the greatest monarch of this part of the world, and likely every day to increase if other princes forslow the good occasions offered, and suffer him to add this empire to the rest, which by far exceedeth all the rest. If his gold now endanger us, he will then be unresistible. (Raleigh 1997, 138) Despite his polemical indictments of Spanish cruelties, Raleigh considered the Spanish conquest as a model to be emulated, not to be superseded. “I shall willingly spend my life” in the conquest of Guiana, he writes, “And if any else shall be enabled thereunto, and conquer the same, I assure him thus much; he shall perform more than ever was done in Mexico by Cortes, or in Peru by Pizarro, whereof the one conquered the empire of Mutezuma, the other of Guascar and Atabalipa” (Raleigh 1997, 136). For Guiana, being the land of the descendants of the Incas and being “directly east from Peru,” hath more abundance of gold than any part of Peru, and as many or more great cities than ever Peru had when it flourished most. It is governed by the same laws, and the emperor and people observe the same religion, and the same form and policies in government as were used in Peru, not differing in any part. And I have been assured by such of the Spaniards as have seen Manoa, the imperial city of Guiana, which the Spaniards call El Dorado, that for the greatness, for the riches, and for the excellent seat, it far exceedeth any of the world, at least of so much of the world as is known to the Spanish nation. (Raleigh 1997, 136) Guiana would be England’s Peru, only better. But the historical relationship that Raleigh constructs in the Discoverie between Guiana and Peru was not only one of parallelism but also one of genealogy, as El Dorado was the descendant and heir of the Inca. With regard to the Spanish conquest of Peru, Raleigh was excellently informed by the Spanish historiography that had already appeared in print (see Ojer 1966, 496–497). He cites, for example, in Spanish with his own English translation, an extended passage from Francisco López de Gómara’s Historia general, in which the Spanish historian described “the court and magnificence of Guaynacapa [Huayna Khapaq]” (Raleigh 1997, 137). Raleigh had also read Pedro Cieza de León’s Crónica del Peru, which had been published in Seville in 1553 and which provided a detailed account of the Spanish conquest. But besides drawing from the published sources written by Spanish authors, much of Raleigh’s knowledge about South America generally, and the legend of El Dorado especially, was based on unpublished “secret” or local sources. Raleigh’s statements on the subject suggest that one of his sources on the El Dorado legend was 372

The white legend

Berrío and the oral tradition that had inspired the Spanish seekers of El Dorado. Berrío also seems to have been one of the sources of Raleigh’s conflation between the Inca and El Dorado. Thus, he writes that Such of the Spaniards as afterwards endeavoured the conquest thereof, whereof there have been many, as shall be declared hereafter, thought that this Inga, of whom this emperor now living is descended, took his way by the river of Amazons, by that branch which is called Papamene. (Raleigh 1997, 138) Berrío, while in Raleigh’s captivity, had related how one Juan Martínez, a soldier who had been abandoned in a boat during one of these expeditions as punishment for his negligence in the explosion of a powder store, had been captured by Native Americans and brought to a golden city that the Indians called “Manoa,” which allegedly stood on a lake up the Orinoco River and had been founded by El Dorado, the Golden King. Martínez (according to Raleigh) had related how every year El Dorado “carouseth with his captains, tributaries, and governors” as they are “stripped naked and their bodies anointed all over with a kind of white Balsamum (by them called Curcai ) …When they are anointed all over, certain servants of the emperor, having prepared gold made into fine powder, blow it thorough hollow canes upon their naked bodies, until they be all shining from the foot to the head” (Raleigh 1997, 140). But even before his capture and interrogation of Berrío, Raleigh had probably first heard of the story of El Dorado from Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, an official of the Spanish crown who had been charged with the fortification of Spain’s South American main and who had fallen captive to some of Raleigh’s privateers in 1586 in the Straits of Magellan en route to Spain (see Lorimer, 2006, xli; also Hemming 1978, 165). This is suggested by Raleigh’s comment that “Many yeares since” he had knowledge, “by relation, of that mighty, rich, and beawtifull Empire of Guiana, and of that great and Golden City, which the Spanyards call El Dorado, and the naturals Manoa, which Citie was conquered, reedified, and inlarged by a younger sonne of Guainacapa [Huayna Capac] Emperor of Peru.”7 If Sarmiento de Gamboa was indeed Raleigh’s earliest source for the connection between El Dorado and the last of the Incas while in English captivity in 1586, the Spaniard had patently offered up a tall tale. As the official chronicler of Peru (who had been commissioned by Viceroy Francisco de Toledo to write the History of the Incas) would certainly have known, the last male descendant of the Incas, Tupac Amaru, had been executed by Toledo in the main square of Cusco in 1572—more than a decade before Sarmiento’s interview with Raleigh. In fact, one of the main reasons why Sarmiento de Gamboa had been commissioned by Viceroy Toledo to write a history of the Incas was precisely to justify the viceroy’s controversial decision to have the last Inca publicly executed. Thus, in his Historia de los Incas (which was completed in 1572 but not published until the twentieth century), Sarmiento de Gamboa had provided a detailed ethnographic account of Inca religious beliefs and practices in which the Incas were portrayed in an extremely unflattering light as devil worshippers, polygamists, and sodomites. The last Inca,Tupac Amaru, was the son of Manco Inca, referred to by Raleigh as “a younger sonne of Guainacapa [Huayna Khapaq] Emperor of Peru,” who had at first been installed as a puppet ruler by the Spaniards after their murder of his older half brother, the Inca Atahualpa, but who had then risen up against them and laid siege to Cusco, only barely failing to retake it in 1536. After the failure of the siege, Manco Inca had withdrawn to Vilcabamba in the remote Amazonian foothills of the Andes, where he reconstituted a neo-Inca state that existed in parallel to the Spanish viceroyalty for some thirty years. After his assassination by some Spanish visitors, 373

Ralph Bauer

Manco Inca’s resistance was carried on by his sons, first Titu Cusi Yupanki and then Tupac Amaru, who engaged in guerilla warfare and occasional raids on Spanish merchants and ‘pacified’ Indians until the final invasion of Vilcabamba by Toledo’s troops in 1572 (see Bauer 2005, 1–56). Thus, when Sarmiento de Gamboa was in Raleigh’s captivity and divulged historical and geographical information about Peru and South America, the last Inca had been dead for some twenty years, and the Spanish chronicler would surely have known it. Still, it is not inconceivable that Raleigh’s confusion with regard to the history of the Incas and the story of El Dorado originated with Sarmiento de Gamboa and his captivity in England. As we know from other sources, Sarmiento de Gamboa frequently offered up entertaining tall tales that were probably meant to sow confusion among the English aspirants to empire in America. For example, in his History of the World, Raleigh relates that his captive responded to his demand for geographic information about the Straits of Magellan with a “pretty jest.” [W]hen I asked him, being then my prisoner, some question about an island in those straits, which methought might have done neither benefit or displeasure to his enterprise, he told me merrily, that it was to be called the Painter’s Wife’s Islands; saying, that whilst the fellow drew that map, his wife sitting by desired him to put in one country for her; that she, in imagination, might have an island of her own. (Raleigh 1964, IV: 684) Whatever the origin of Raleigh’s particular confusion with regard to the story of El Dorado, it seems likely that Sarmiento de Gamboa’s oral testimony was the main source of Raleigh’s story about an apocalyptic prophecy found during the Spanish conquest of Cusco foretelling the restoration of the “Inga” from Spanish oppression by a man from “Inglatierra.” Thus, in his Historia de los Incas, Sarmiento de Gamboa had related the story of the defeat of the powerful Chancas by the Inca Yupanki (ca. 1438-1471). The Chancas had invaded the Inca homeland around Cusco and driven Viracocha Inca (Yupanki’s father) and his designated successor, Urco Huaranca, to flee the capital. During the epic battle outside Cusco, the Inca Yupanki demonstrated great bravery and was miraculously assisted by mysterious warriors descending from the mountains, who were said to have been “sent by Viracocha, the creator, as succor for the Inca” (Sarmiento de Gamboa 1999, 92) (“enviaba el Viracocha su criador para su ayuda” [Sarmiento de Gamboa 2018, 202]). After Inca Yupanki’s victory over the Chancas, the Incas honored him for his triumph “with many epithets, especially calling him Pachacuti, which means ‘overturner of the earth’, alluding to the lands and farms which they looked upon as lost by the coming of the Chancas. For he had made them free and save again. From that time he was called Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui” (Sarmiento de Gamboa 1999, 92) (“honraron con muchos epítetos a Inca Yupanqui, especialmente llamándo[lo] Pachacuti, que quiere decir ‘volvedor de la tierra’ queriendo decir que la tierra y haciendas, que tenían por perdidas por la venida de los chancas, él se las había libertado y asegurado.Y de allí adelante se llamó Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui [Sarmiento de Gamboa 2018, 203)]). Moreover, Pachacuti Yupanqui was made Inca and greatly expanded the empire all through South America, thoroughly reorganizing all facets of the Inca world in the process. It is because of his role as a transformer, both in war and in peace, that he received the title “Pachacuti.” Under Spanish rule, the Inca Pachacuti came to occupy a central role in Andean apocalyptic resistance movements as early as the sixteenth century. The Andean concept of pachacuti derives from the Quechua noun pacha (epoch, era, time and space, or state of being) and the verb kutiy (to return, go back, change, turn back). The concept of kuti is symbolized in Andean iconographic traditions by the digging stick, taclla, with its curved hook, with which the soil is 374

The white legend

plowed. Sarmiento de Gamboa was thus literally correct when he defined a pachacuti as an “overturner of the earth.” However, in an extended sense, the concept of pachacuti pertained also to “cycles of time and space and cataclysmic events” in Andean cosmogony, revolving around “oscillations of time/space in which periodic catastrophes define moments of transition separating epochs” (Steele and Allen 2004, 226–227). The legacy of the Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui as an overturner of epochs lived on in Andean millenarian traditions from the time of the Spanish conquest to the present in the apocalyptic expectation that another pachacuti will emerge who will shake off the colonial European yoke, just as the Inca Yupanki had shaken off the Chanca yoke. While in modern times, this concept lives on in the leftist indigenist political movement originating in Bolivia, in the post-Conquest Viceregal period, the millenarian tradition of pachacuti often revolved around the apocalyptic conflict between the Spanish king, Españarrí, and the Inca king, Incarrí. Although the present age is dominated by the Españarrí, another pachacuti will usher forth the victorious return of the Incarrí. Such a pachacuti appeared to have arrived during the late 1560s, when an indigenous millenarian movement called taki unquy (dancing sickness) arose in the Andes during which charismatic leaders called upon Andeans to resist the viceregal state and Spanish missionaries and to return to the old worship of huacas (sacred stones and places). Spanish officials were extremely concerned and convinced (probably correctly) that this millenarian movement had emanated from the neo-Inca state at Vilcabamba and therefore renewed their attempts to bring it under Spanish control, successfully invading it in 1572.8 Still, the (post)colonial tradition of pachacuti lived on as a millenarian prophecy of a return of the Inca bringing about an end to Spanish (or European) rule in the Andes throughout the Spanish viceregal period and (later) during the modern national period. Raleigh’s sixteenth-century contribution to this mestizo mechanism was to insert a role for himself and “Inglatierra” as an ally of “Incarrí” in the colonial Andean millenarian resistance movement of pachacuti. In devising the narrative ploy of bringing an indigenous prophetic tradition into connection with the European arrival in America, Raleigh was possibly (even likely) inspired also by Hernando Cortés’ Second Letter to Charles V, which had been translated into multiple languages and printed throughout Europe. There, Cortés first told the tale that would later develop into the Mexican national myth of Quetzalcoatl, according to which the Mesoamerican deity had allegedly departed for the east in mythic times after being disobeyed by his people but prophesied his triumphant return to resume his legitimate rule over Anahuac, the high plateau of Mexico. Although Cortés, in his letter, does not yet name this deity, he planted the seed of the legend by inventing a speech that Montezuma allegedly gave upon first facing the Spaniards on one of the causeways leading into Tenochtitlan. According to this speech, the Aztecs believed the Spaniards to be the emissaries of the returning god, who is called a “chieftain” there and who would resume his rightful place as lord of Anahuac, hereby replacing the ruling Aztec elite, who were but illegitimate newcomers. “For a long time we have known from the writings of our ancestors,” Cortés has Montezuma say, that neither I, nor any of those who dwell in this land, are natives of it, but foreigners who came from very distant parts; and likewise we know that a chieftain, of whom they were all vassals, brought our people to this region. And he returned to his native land and after many years came again, by which time all those who had remained were married to native women and had built villages and raised children. And when he wished to lead them away again they would not go nor even admit him as their chief; and so he departed. And we have always held that those who descended from him would come and conquer this land and take us as their vassals. So because of the place from which you claim to come, namely, from where the sun rises, and the things you 375

Ralph Bauer

tell us of the great lord or king who sent you here, we believe and are certain that he is our natural lord, especially as you say he has known of us for some time. So be assured that we shall obey you and hold you as our lord in place of that great sovereign of whom you speak; and in this there shall be no offense or betrayal whatsoever. (Cortés 1971, 85–86) [Muchos días ha que por nuestras escripturas tenemos de nuestros antepasados noticia que yo ni todos los que en esta tierra habitamos no somos naturales de ella sino estranjeros y venidos a ella de partes muy estrañas.Y tenemos ansimesmo que a estas partes trajo nuestra generación un señor cuyos vasallos todos eran, el cual se volvió a su naturaleza.Y después tornó a venir dende en mucho tiempo y tanto que ya estaban casados los que habían quedado con las mujeres naturales de la tierra y tenían mucha generación y fechos pueblos donde vivían.Y queriéndolos llevar consigo, no quisieron ir ni menos rescebirle por señor, y así se volvió. Y siempre hemos tenido que los que dél descendiesen habían de venir a sojuzgar esta tierra y a nosotros como a sus vasallos, y segúnd de la parte que vos decís que venís, que es hacia a do sale el sol, y las cosas que decís de ese grand señor o rey que acá os invió, creemos y tenemos por cierto, él ser nuestro señor natural, en especial que nos decís que él ha muchos días tenía noticia de nosotros. Y por tanto, vos sed cierto que os obedeceremos y ternemos por señor en lugar dese gran señor que decís, y que en ello no habrá falta ni engaño alguno.] (Cortés [1520] 1993, 210–211) It is unclear whether or not the Mexica had a pre-Hispanic prophetic tradition foretelling the return of Quetzalcoatl.What is clear is that the speech ascribed to Montezuma is an act of colonial ventriloquism by Cortés. From the many references that Raleigh makes to Cortés in his Discoverie, it is also clear that Raleigh was very well informed about the Spanish conquest of Mexico, possibly having read one of the sixteenth-century published editions of Cortés’ Second Letter to Charles V in which the passage quoted above occurs. Similarly, Raleigh’s account of an Inca prophecy foretelling the arrival of the English is an act of colonial ventriloquism, but it was also an act of cultural translation and appropriation that fused in his text with the Andean tradition of pachacuti, familiar from the writings of missionary and imperial ethnographers, into a mestizo mechanism. The product of this mestizo mechanism was an idea of an English “discoverie” of America that would have a long legacy in the history of British imperialism in America (see Burnett 2000). Thus, while Raleigh’s historical endeavors in the discovery of El Dorado and his secret city of Manoa remained fruitless, the narrative alchemy of his Discoverie laid one of the most foundational ideological building blocks in an emergent British imperialist ideology, the fiction that the English arrival in America fulfilled ancient Indian prophecies that foretold the liberation from the Spanish regime of terror and oppression.The alchemy of the White Legend—of an English idea of a “discovery” of America—hereby hinged on the notion that a virginal America had remained hidden from the Spanish rapists, saving herself for penetration by an English husband.

Notes 1 For the longevity of this idea still in the nineteenth century and beyond, see Burnett (2000), especially 25–66. 2 For a critique of this mythology, see Jennings 1975 and Cañizares-Esguerra 2006. 3 On translation between imperial Spain and Early Modern England, see Fuchs 2004, 75–78; Fuchs 2010; and Marroquín-Arredondo and Bauer 2019.

376

The white legend 4 Montrose 1993, 182; see also Greenblatt 1973, 55–84; Fuller 1995; Hamlin 1996; and Shannon 1998. The classic account in this revisionist hermeneutic practice was Edmundo O’Gorman’s La invención de América (1958); but for more recent examples of this approach, see Greenblatt 1993; Rabasa 1993; Williams and Lewis 1993; Kadir 1992; and Householder 2011. 5 See Whitehead 1997, 72–91. 6 The classic account of the history of the Black Legend remains Gibson 1971; but also see Greer et al. 2007; and Fuchs 2007. 7 Raleigh 1997, 121–122. The earliest Spanish written account bringing the history of the Incas in connection with the legend of El Dorado appears to have been written by the Spanish soldier de Pedro Maraver de Silva, though this account was not published, and it is therefore unlikely that Raleigh would have been aware of it; see Maraver de Silva 1576, r 28; also Hemming 1978, 43–45. 8 See Steele and Allen 2004, 226–227; also MacCormack 1988 and 1991, 285–311; and Bauer 2005.

Works cited Bauer, Ralph. 2003. The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2005. An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru, by Titu Cusi Yupanki. Boulder: University Press of Colorado. ———. 2019. The Alchemy of Conquest: Religion, Science, and the Secrets of the New World. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Boorstin, Daniel J. 1985. The Discoverers. New York:Vintage Books. Burnett, Graham. 2000. Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. 2006. Puritan Conquistadors: Iberianizing the Atlantic, 1550-1700. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cortés, Hernando. 1971. “Second Letter to Charles V.” In Letters from Mexico, translated and edited by Anthony Pagden, 47–159. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press Cortés, Hernán. 1993. [1520]. “Segunda relación.” In Cartas de relación, edited by Ángel Delgado Gómez, 159–309. Madrid: Castalia. Fuchs, Barbara. 2004. Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2007. “The Spanish Race.” In Greer, Mignolo and Quilligan, eds. Rereading the Black Legend. 88–98. ———. 2010. “Introduction: The Spanish Connection: Literary and Historical Perspectives on AngloIberian Relations.” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10 (1): 1–4. Fuller, Mary C. 1995. Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576-1624. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gandía, Enrique de. 1946. Historia crítica de los mitos y leyendas de la Conquista americana. Buenos Aires: Centro Difusor Del Libro. Gibson, Charles. ed. 1971. The Black Legend: Anti-Spanish Attitudes in the Old World and the New. New York: Knopf. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1973. Sir Walter Raleigh: The Renaissance Man and his Roles. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen, ed. 1993. New World Encounters. Berkeley: University of California Press. Greer, Margaret Rich. 2007. “Introduction.” In Greer, Mignolo, and Quilligan, eds. Rereading the Black Legend, 1–26. Greer, Margaret Rich, Walter Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, eds. 2007. Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Greene, Roland. 1999. Unrequited Conquests: Love and Empire in the Colonial Americas. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Gruzinski, Serge. 2002. The Mestizo Mind: the Intellectual Dynamics of Colonization and Globalization. London: Routledge. Hamlin, William. 1996. “Imagined Apotheosis: Drake, Harriot, and Ralegh in the Americas.” Journal of the History of Ideas 57 (3): 405–428

377

Ralph Bauer Harlow, Vincent Todd. 1928.“Introduction. In The Discoverie of Guiana, xv–cvi, edited by Sir Walter Raleigh. London: Argonaut. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1989. Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit, 1827-8.Translated and introduced by Robert Williams. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hemming, John. 1978. The Search for El Dorado. New York: Dutton. Householder, Michael. 2011. Inventing Americans in the Age of Discovery: Narratives of Encounter. Farnham, UK: Ashgate. Jennings, Francis. 1975. The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Kadir, Djelal. 1992. Columbus and the Ends of the Earth: Europe’s Prophetic Rhetoric as Conquering Ideology. Berkeley: University of California Press. Las Casas, Bartolomé de. (1552) 1992. , A short account of the destruction of the Indies, Edited and translated by Nigel Griffin; with an introduction by Anthony Pagden. London, England/New York : Penguin Books. ———. (1552) 2006. Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, edited by José Miguel MartínezTorrejón. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante. ———. 1583. The Spanish Colonie, or Briefe Chronicle of the Acts and Gestes of the Spaniardes in the West Indies, called the newe World. Translated by M. M. S. London: Imprinted for William Brome. Lorimer, Joyce. 2006. “Introduction.” In Sir Walter Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana, xvii–xcvi, edited by Joyce Lorimer. Aldershot: Ashgate for the Hakluyt Society. MacCormack, Sabine. 1988. “Pachacuti: Miracles, Punishments, and Last Judgment: Visionary Past and Prophetic Future in Early Colonial Peru.” The American Historical Review 93 (4): 960–1006. ———. 1991. Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Maraver de Silva, Pedro. 1576. “Relación del viaje de Pedro Maraver de Silva: El Dorado.” Archivo General de Indias, PATRONATO, 26. Marroquín-Arredondo, Jaime, and Ralph Bauer, eds. 2019. Translating Nature: Cross-Cultural Histories of Early Modern Science. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Miller, Shannon. 1998. Invested with Meaning:The Raleigh Circle in the New World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Montrose, Louis. 1993. “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery.” In Greenblatt, New World Encounters, Berkeley: University of California Press, 177–217. Nicholl, Charles. 1995. The Creature in the Map: A Journey to El Dorado. New York: William Morrow and Company. Ojer, Pablo. 1966. La formación del oriente venezolano. Caracas: Universidad Católica “Andrés Bello,” Facultad de Humanidades y Educación, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas. Rabasa, José. 1993. Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism.. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Raleigh, Walter. 1599. Kurtze wunderbare Beschreibung : dess Goldreichen Königreichs Guianae in America, … so newlich Anno 1594, 1595, vnnd 1596 von … Herrn Walthero Ralegh einem Englischen Ritter, besucht worden: erstlich auss befehl seiner gnaden in zweyen büchlein beschrieben, … / jetzt aber ins hochteutsch gebracht, vnd auss vnterschietlichen authoribus erkläret durch Levinum Hulsium. Nuremberg: impensis Levini Hulsii. ———. (1829) 1964. “The History of the World.” In The Works of Sir Walter Raleigh, 8 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (1596) 1997. The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, edited by Neil Whitehead. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Ramos Pérez, Demetrio. 1973. El mito del Dorado. Su génesis y su proceso. Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia. Sarmiento de Gamboa, Pedro. 1999. History of the Incas. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. ———. 2018. Segunda parte de La historia general llamada índica (1572). Estudio y edición anotada de Aleksín H. Ortega. PhD diss., City University of New York. Steele, Paul Richard and Catherine Allen. 2004. Handbook of Inca Mythology. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC Clio. Whitehead, Neil. R. 1997. Introduction. In Raleigh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, edited by Neil Whitehead, 1–91. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Williams, Jerry M., and Robert E. Lewis, eds. 1993. Early Images of the Americas:Transfer and Invention.Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

378

22 THE AGENCY OF TRANSLATION IN COLONIAL LATIN AMERICA Rethinking the roles of non-European linguistic intermediaries Larissa Brewer-García

Translation has an exceedingly capacious definition in early modern texts. This chapter conceives of it as the linguistic exchange between two or more mutually unintelligible language communities. Historically, five overlapping uses of this kind of translation have been studied by scholars of colonial Latin America: translation performed for (1) military campaigns by Iberians and their allies to invade distinct areas of the Americas; (2) historical narratives produced in the aftermath of conquest about the Americas before, during, and after Iberian arrival; (3) legal documents drafted as and after American territories became part of Iberian Empires; (4) texts produced to generate and circulate knowledge about the New World’s natural resources and technologies to extract and manipulate them in and beyond the Spanish Empire; and (5) evangelism. Recent studies across this typology have placed renewed emphasis on the influence of non-European linguistic intermediaries as agents. Despite its centrality to these recent studies, agency itself has been the subject of little explicit attention in them. Most scholars, in their use of the concept as a plotting device, define the agent as the antithesis of the passive victim of physical or symbolic colonial violence. For example, John Charles asserts, with reference to the Andean intermediaries who are the protagonists of his study, that “Indians were historical agents and not passive victims of Spanish designs” (2010, 14) and Alcira Dueñas describes how lettered indios and mestizos “fought their way into the ciudad letrada” (2010, 3). In taking such approaches, most recent studies avoid narrating the agency of non-European linguistic intermediaries as one that clearly maps onto a dichotomous field of action divided between “colonizers” and “colonized.” In fact, while colonial translation scholarship has not explicitly engaged with postcolonial and poststructuralist critiques of agency (Butler 1993; Hartman 1997; Johnson 2003; Scott 2004), much of it resonates with those critiques. This chapter surveys the treatment of non-European linguistic intermediaries as agents in recent studies on translation in colonial Latin America and concludes with a reflection from my own research on the methods and problems of analyzing the agency of translation. 379

Larissa Brewer-García

Assessments of the role of translation in colonial Latin American military conquests have popularly focused on Malintzin, also known as La Malinche or Doña Marina and her crucial role in the military invasion of central Mexico by Hernan Cortés in 1519. Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s Historia verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España (1632) attributes her ability to speak Nahuatl and Mayan to the fact that she was a Nahua woman who had been given to a Mayan community as a child (chapter 37). Cortés, according to Díaz, was able to manipulate communication with Nahuatl-speaking groups throughout central Mexico by “speaking through” Doña Marina and Jerónimo de Aguilar, a Sevillian castaway who had spent several years as a slave among the Maya before Cortés’s arrival in Veracruz (chapter 37). Elaborating on Díaz’s comment that Doña Marina also gave birth to Cortés’s child before he wedded her to one of his soldiers, Octavio Paz’s famous essay from 1950 describes her as both victim of rape and a traitor to indigenous people.1 In the early 1980s,Tzvetan Todorov’s Conquest of America recast Malintzin’s role in the conquest, arguing that she was more a willing traitor than a victim (1982 [1984], 100–101).Another decade later, Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvelous Possessions alternatively described Doña Marina as a “tool” of Cortés (1991, 144–145). Camilla Townsend’s Malintzin’s Choices (2006) represents a recent reassessment of the iconic interpreter, circling back to Díaz del Castillo’s approach of focusing on her to narratively displace Cortés as the main actor of the conquest. Townsend’s method fills out the sparse historical record about Malintzin by reading available sources in dialogue with documents about the broader world that shaped her before, during, and after the fall of Tenochtitlan.2 There are, of course, many other intermediaries who appear in narratives and archives about initial Spanish explorations and military incursions in the Americas who hold a less prominent status. Anna Brickhouse’s The Unsettlement of America (2014) highlights several. The first part of Brickhouse’s book underscores the interruptions to colonial projects caused by native interpreters, including the captured “tongues” [lenguas] described in Columbus’s diary, offering alternative readings of the directionality and consequences of translation employed in initial encounters between European and indigenous actors than those made by Todorov and Greenblatt. The main focus of Brickhouse’s book is Paquinquineo/Don Luis de Velasco, an Algonquian-speaking native of the area now considered the Chesapeake Bay who left with the Spanish during one of their initial forays into the area in 1561. Brickhouse explains that after leaving the Chesapeake Paquinquineo converted to Christianity, becoming the namesake of the Viceroy of Mexico. After nine years of travels across the Atlantic and the Caribbean, he participated in a Jesuit mission back to the Chesapeake in 1570. Brickhouse recounts how, upon his return to the Chesapeake, Don Luis (as she calls him) turned against the Jesuit mission in a series of events that she reads as a premeditated plan of unsettlement, a calculated attack intended to discourage Spanish colonial designs. Brickhouse’s speculative readings of this and other “motivated mistranslations” by native intermediaries emphasize the subversive effects of indigenous mediation in early Spanish and indigenous encounters. While much of Brickhouse’s book examines the use of translation for military exploration and settlement campaigns, she also reflects on the translations performed to produce historical narratives of the colonial past (the second category of this typology).3 Brickhouse does so in the second part of her book dedicated to Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s strategic interpretation of earlier Spanish narratives of settlement in La Florida del Inca.The third part then traces how Anglophone British and later US translators of Iberian-American texts performed their own motivated mistranslations of Spanish-language colonial sources to advance new projects of territorial possession. In foregrounding indigenous interpreters as agents of history rather than invisible victims or pawns and juxtaposing them to European historians as translators of others’ historical accounts, Brickhouse underscores that Spaniards neither had a monopoly over the ends of inter-lingual 380

The agency of translation in colonial Latin America

communication in the Americas nor were they the sole benefactors of the accumulation of knowledge to be gained by crossing the Atlantic and the Caribbean. The study of the third type of translation—that which pertains to legal settings and ­documents—has its roots in a school of colonial Latin American historiography led by James Lockhart and his students in the 1970s, which came to be called New Philology (see Restall 2003).The methods employed and conclusions generated from this school concentrated on narrating the history of native peoples that could be told through Nahuatl-language legal texts produced after the fall of Tenochtitlan.4 Several decades later, with Yanna Yannakakis’s Art of Being In-Between (2008), the narration of that history became explicitly organized around translation in colonial legal and administrative settings (see also Yannakakis 2012 and 2014). José Carlos de la Puente’s recent Andean Cosmopolitans (2018) makes a significant new contribution to this line of research by considering indigenous mediations in Andean legal archives, which have received much less attention than their central American counterparts (see also Puente Luna 2014). Like Brickhouse (2014), de la Puente foregrounds the circulation of non-European networks of knowledge and indigenous travelers in the Atlantic world. Unlike Brickhouse, however, de la Puente frames Andean communities and individuals as co-producers of empire in the Americas rather than anti-colonial agents of resistance. In conversation with scholarship on other Andean intermediaries by Frank Salomon (1982), Rolena Adorno (1986, 1994), Alcira Dueñas (2010), and John Charles (2010), de la Puente tells a story of Andean actors who redeployed strategies of imperial relations developed under the Inca to advocate for their interests in legal fora, petitions, and physical voyages to the Iberian Peninsula. These strategies included, especially in the sixteenth century, using the Andean knotted cord recording system of the khipu to support information provided in legal documents and letters to the metropolis about the Andean communities in question. De la Puente demonstrates that the Andean intermediaries of his study advocated on their own behalves and on behalf of larger communities (sometimes privileging one over the other). The newest area of study on colonial translation in which important scholarship has recently developed involves the production and circulation of knowledge about the natural world and technologies for manipulating it in the Americas. In particular, Allison Bigelow’s Mining Language (2020) uses translation as a means of accessing the long-ignored influence of non-European actors in generating knowledge about New World metals and metallurgy. Bigelow’s book compellingly traces how native-language terms for metals were translated into Iberian-authored natural histories, missionary bilingual dictionaries, and vernacular scientific treatises. She does this to examine the “intellectual contributions of peoples whose ways of knowing have gone largely under-acknowledged in the colonial science historiography, such as mining women, Afro-Latin artisans, and indigenous experts” (2020, 12). The composite terms that appear in Spanish language texts about metals and mining in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries promise important archival recoveries for Bigelow who analyzes them as evidence of the participation of non-European actors in the generation of knowledge and the labor required to extract and manipulate the metals. Bigelow’s method combines strategies drawn from historical linguistics, new materialism, intellectual history, and social history, innovatively bringing them into conversation with translation studies.5 Like the third part of Brickhouse’s study, Bigelow then adds another “stage” of translation to her analysis by tracing how the Iberian-language texts in question were subsequently translated into other European languages.6 The final, much older, area of study on translation that continues to grow with recent scholarship is that of its use in colonial evangelical projects. Examining sources such as those composed by Bernardino de Sahagún and his European and indigenous collaborators, Louise Burkhart’s The Slippery Earth (1989) set the stage for contemporary examinations of colonial 381

Larissa Brewer-García

evangelical translation in New Spain in her landmark study of the creation of notions of sin, guilt, and restitution in Nahuatl.7 Earlier that decade Frank Salomon (1982) and George L. Urioste (1982) had also authored examinations of the use of translation in Andean evangelical projects. Several recent notable studies on evangelical translation in colonial Latin America have combined religious-anthropological approaches employed by Burkhart with those of linguists to characterize the changes undergone by the languages themselves as they were codified for evangelical translation (Durston 2007; Hanks 2010; Farriss 2018).8 While scholars have noted that many “authors” of the official translations of religious texts in the Americas were Iberians or criollos who learned native languages (Barros 2001; Durston 2007), recent research also highlights the important collaboration between those Spanish and criollo language specialists and indigenous and mestizo native-language instructors or interpreters upon whom they often depended (Charles 2010; Brewer-García 2012; León Llerena 2014; Magaloni Kerpel 2014; Brewer-García 2016; Bigelow 2017; Wilde 2017).9 The extent to which participation by native speakers of non-European languages in evangelical projects indexes non-European agency in those projects is a contentious question, however, as I will illustrate in the second part of this chapter. Despite their differences, the recent studies in the five areas reviewed above present colonial translation as a dynamic process in which actors from distinct language groups in the Atlantic world communicated with each other to produce new words, ideas, objects, and social relationships. Collectively, this scholarship demonstrates that leaving behind old conceptions of translation as either faithful preservation or traitorous change allows for new stories about non-European participation in the Atlantic world to be told.Through concepts such as the motivated mistranslation (Brickhouse), the zealous adoption of legal fora and formats to make demands of the imperial center (Puente Luna), or the composite languages of vernacular science and industry (Bigelow), these scholars remind us that the colonial archive is bigger than previously thought and full of interventions by actors, languages, and objects whose influence on European and colonial societies has historically been underestimated.

Reflections on method Despite the growth in the trend identified above, there is no consensus on how contemporary scholars should analyze the previously underestimated roles played by non-European linguistic intermediaries in colonial Latin America when their archival traces are so often incomplete, inconsistent, or merely implicit. I have reflected on this question throughout my own research on translation in the context of the transatlantic slave trade to colonial Spanish America. These reflections have not only been informed by the historiography on translation in colonial Latin American studies and postcolonial translation studies, but also conversations in slavery studies about the pitfalls of over-privileging narratives of agency as resistance by enslaved or formerly enslaved actors in the past (Hartman 1997; Johnson 2003; Helton et al. 2015; Fuentes 2016). As part of a summary of my research on the black evangelical interpreters of seventeenth-century Cartagena de Indias in what follows, I offer my own thoughts about why studies of translation in colonial Latin America should avoid singularly gravitating toward stories about resistant agencies of non-European linguistic intermediaries and how one might go about doing so. My research on black linguistic intermediaries in colonial Spanish America emerged from reading Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval’s Naturaleza, policia sagrada i profana, costumbres i ritos, disciplina i catechismo de todos etiopes (1627). Modeling his text on José de Acosta’s De procuranda indorum salute (1588) and Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590), Sandoval attempted to produce a comparable evangelical method for black men and women in the Americas. To this end, his 382

The agency of translation in colonial Latin America

treatise includes a compendium of information about the nature, customs, beliefs, and behaviors of the principal regions in Africa from which men, women, and children were being taken to the Americas and instructions for how to use that information to evangelize the sick, exhausted, and terrified populations disembarking from slave ships in Cartagena and other New World ports. These populations, Sandoval explains, were particularly challenging to evangelize because the dispersal and dispossession of the slave trade had made it so that the individuals disembarking from slave ships often could not understand each other let alone the priests speaking only European languages. Unlike Acosta’s argument in De procuranda indorum salute which advocates for increased training in indigenous languages for European and criollo priests so they could speak directly to indigenous populations in their own languages, Sandoval declares in the third book of his treatise that priests should use black interpreters to evangelize newly arrived black populations in the Americas (Brewer-García 2020, 88–91). He justifies this position by suggesting that adopting a comparable linguistic strategy to that of indigenous evangelization would be “morally impossible” (1627, book III, chapter 2, 234v).The languages spoken by the new arrivals from Africa, Sandoval explains, were too many and too mutually unintelligible to justify asking priests to dedicate years of their lives to learning any one of them. As a result, the Jesuit mission among newly arrived black men and women would have to depend entirely on enslaved black interpreters. Sandoval’s prescriptions for this evangelical project built around enslaved black interpreters led me to ask about the influence the crucial-but-anonymous black linguistic intermediaries of Sandoval’s treatise might have had on the Jesuits’ evangelical projects in Cartagena and Lima and the black Christian subjectivities they sought to produce. This line of questioning was further complicated when I read more broadly and learned that the enslaved black interpreters who Sandoval mentions as an abstract type in his treatise appear less anonymously in a series of related texts produced in seventeenth-century Cartagena around the beatification inquest for Jesuit priest Pedro Claver (Proceso 1676), Sandoval’s successor in the evangelical mission among black men and women in Cartagena. Furthermore, the black interpreters also appear, I learned, in non-Jesuit Inquisition and criminal trials from seventeenthcentury Cartagena (AHN, Inquisición; AGI, Patronato 234). Once I knew some of the interpreters’ names and could read their mediated testimonies describing their work as evangelical assistants, I had to decide how to analyze and write about these sources. After much thought and many drafts, I determined that the best method for analyzing them involves interpreting the distinct kinds of sources they helped produce in explicit conversation with each other and the broader context of colonial Cartagena.These distinct sources show that the enslaved black interpreters became spiritual leaders and evangelizers who moved throughout the city and the port as agents of the priests for whom they worked. Through their support of the Jesuit mission, the interpreters helped circulate and produce written descriptions of beautiful black bodies and souls in seventeenth-century Spanish America (Brewer-García 2016, 2020). In calling the interpreters agents of the Jesuit mission, I note that the sources describing or indexing black intermediaries’ influence in the Jesuit evangelical mission do not provide evidence for a larger story about a “hidden transcript” (Scott 1992) that was explicitly resistant to the broader slave labor system, the Spanish colonial project, or the Jesuit mission among black men and women. And yet these sources nonetheless offer glimpses of unique positively inflected language to describe blackness circulating in seventeenth-century Cartagena as well as tensions that emerged from the overlapping of the evangelical project, the secular colonial administrative project, and the slave labor system in Cartagena. These tensions deserve to be analyzed as more than just innocuous glitches in a smooth historical trajectory of the establishment of successful European dominance in the Americas. Sandoval mentions, for example, that priests need to keep

383

Larissa Brewer-García

the enslaved black interpreters interested and invested in the evangelical task by treating them well, giving them gifts, food, and additional medical care: We will sweeten the interpreters with devotional goods, having also won them over by confessing them and treating them well, because they tend to tire with the hard work and frustration that come with this ministry.Thus, either respect or reward keeps them with you and encourages them. [A las mesmas lenguas saborearemos con algunas cosas de devocion, teniendolas tambien ganadas por averlas confessado, y buen modo de tratallas, porque se suelen cansar con el mucho trabajo y enfado que en este exercicio hallan, para que o el respeto o el premio las detenga o aliente.] (1627; book III, chapter 2, 237v) Implicit in Sandoval’s comment is that messages translated by enslaved interpreters under physical coercion, fatigue, or frustration could be erroneous. In line with the prescriptive purpose of his text as a method for others to follow, Sandoval downplays the problems related to the interpreters’ potentially inconvenient needs and desires in order to emphasize the success of his method of translation for evangelical efforts in Cartagena. My method of reading translation in Sandoval’s treatise and the related corpus surrounding it creates space around the framing of linguistic translation as a process that always ensures the complete continuity of a transferred message across a change in medium and religious conversion as process that always enacts a complete spiritual transformation. As I adopt this approach, I linger over the inconsistencies in the Jesuits’ practical examples of the work of translation such as those mentioned here, asking what these moments can teach us about residual matter and meanings created in translation that are not fully inscribed by the notions of seamless linguistic translation and complete spiritual conversion that Sandoval proposes. To add dimension to these reflections, I read Sandoval’s accounts in conversation with descriptions of the work of translation conducted by black evangelical assistants in the beatification inquest for Pedro Claver. Claver, Sandoval’s protégé in Cartagena, was considered a potential saint upon his death in 1654. Because many of his virtues were deployed in the service of black evangelization, nine black interpreters who worked with Sandoval and Claver testify in the beatification inquest, describing the work they performed for the mission. The most substantial of these testimonies is related by interpreter Andrés Sacabuche “of the Angola nation” [de nación Angola] ([1659] Proceso 1676, 99v–109v). Sacabuche’s testimony was delivered as a first-person oral narrative, transcribed in the third person by the notary on site, and then translated from Spanish to Italian when the manuscript of the trial traveled to Rome eleven years later. The testimony demonstrates that along every step of the catechism and baptism process, the interpreters shaped the experiences and interpretations of what it meant to become black Christians in Cartagena. Comparing Sandoval’s prescriptions to Sacabuche’s and his colleagues’ descriptions of their work reveals that the tasks of translation changed over time so that interpreters took on even greater leadership roles in the catechism process than those Sandoval proposed in his treatise in the course of the more than thirty years that passed from the composition of Sandoval’s treatise to the transcription of the testimonies for Claver’s beatification inquest. A final methodological strategy for reading the scenarios of evangelical translation by black men and women involves considering, when possible and without falling into gross generalizations, the African precedents for the black interpreters in Cartagena whom the black new arrivals might have used to perceive and interact with the interpreters upon arrival. For example, 384

The agency of translation in colonial Latin America

Cécile Fromont’s study (2014) of the visual culture of Christianity in the early modern kingdom of Kongo describes the roles played by Kongolese mestres, elite native church guardians, interpreters, and spiritual guides who appear throughout missionary images from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Fromont explains that these mestres were key facilitators for European priests’ missionary and sacramental work and important leaders in the spreading and preserving of Christianity even when European priests were not present. It is suggestive to consider that West Central Africans, like Andrés Sacabuche, who came from the partially Christianized areas of the Kongo and Angola in the early to mid-seventeenth century, could have perceived the black interpreters working with Sandoval and Pedro Claver in Cartagena as New World iterations of Kongolese mestres. Another possibility is that the multilingual Biafada (Biafara in Spanish documents) women who served as cultural brokers, interpreters, and traders in Portuguese interactions with Upper Guineans in the late sixteenth through seventeenth centuries described in studies by George E. Brooks (2003, 55) and Philip Havik (2012, 318–319) served as precedents and models for female black interpreters in Cartagena such as María de Mendoza, a freed Biafada woman who testifies in the beatification inquest as having served as Claver’s interpreter for more than thirty years ([1668] Proceso 1676, 238r). By combining these distinct approaches, I argue that scholars must read against colonial evangelical texts’ tendencies to alienate the products of translation from the processes, people, and backgrounds producing them.Yet in doing so, it is equally important to avoid venturing too far into a speculative reading that over-generalizes the intentions and effects of the intermediaries’ participation. A solution I found for avoiding such an overgeneralization is to consider the wider context in which these interpreters worked and the overlapping of the five kinds of colonial translation described in this chapter’s opening typology. For example, the two non-Jesuit sets of texts from seventeenth-century Cartagena that describe the labor of translation performed by the Jesuits’ black interpreters show that their labor was not confined to evangelical projects.These sources are (1) Inquisition proceeding summaries and (2) criminal trial transcripts. Regarding their appearance in Inquisition sources, previous scholarship has suggested that Claver, in collaboration with the Jesuits’ black interpreters, helped black defendants secure reduced sentences for crimes of witchcraft (Splendiani et al. 1997, 145).10 These reduced sentences, compared to other cases for which some records exist, appear to be based on successful claims of the defendants’ poor evangelization due to being unacculturated. While these examples could provide grist for a broader story about the protection offered by black interpreters for black people arriving in and passing through seventeenth-century New Granada, the available evidence is too sparse to ground a solid argument (only some trial summaries survive, rather than full transcripts of trials or any pre-trial depositions or confessions). Furthermore, the appearance of a black interpreter owned by the Jesuits in a criminal trial proceeding against recaptured maroons from 1634 warns against such a generalization. The criminal trial transcript that mentions one of the Jesuits’ black interpreters is part of a dossier kept at the Archivo General de Indias that documents a series of conflicts between the city council of Cartagena and two maroon communities (hereafter palenques) surrounding the city between 1633 and 1634 (AGI, Patronato 234, R. 7, nos. 1 and 2). The dossier contains justifications for military campaigns to the hinterlands to eradicate the palenques, followed by descriptions of the logistics of those campaigns, and then the proceedings from the criminal trials of the black men and women who were captured and taken back to Cartagena after the campaigns. As part of these trials, 18 captured black men and women from the palenques were forced to answer a series of questions posed by the city prosecutor. The first 12 of the 18 who testified in the proceedings were subsequently sentenced to execution.11 The proceedings describe how, after giving their testimonies, their death sentences were composed, and they were 385

Larissa Brewer-García

led to the gallows by a town crier publicizing their crimes and the punishment to which they had been sentenced. At the gallows, the black men were strangled by wire or rope. Their bodies were then decapitated and quartered and their severed heads and limbs were put on display throughout Cartagena and the surrounding rural areas. Two of the men thus executed—witnesses five and six in the trial dossier —related their testimonies through one of the Jesuits’ enslaved black interpreters before they were sentenced to death. The interpreter, identified in the proceedings as “Andrés Angola, ladino black slave of the Jesuit fathers” [Andrés Angola negro ladino esclavo de los padres de la compañia de Jesus], is the same Andrés Sacabuche from Pedro Claver’s beatification inquest mentioned above (Proceso 1676).12 The two men for whom Sacabuche interprets in the legal proceedings are Sebastián Anchico and Domingo Anchico.What, I asked in reading the proceedings, can the transcripts of Sebastián Anchico’s and Domingo Anchico’s translated testimonies tell us about the nature and the effects of Sacabuche’s participation in the trial? In the testimonies, Sebastián and Domingo claim they did not choose to flee their owners to become maroons; they explain that they were captured by other maroons and taken to the Palenque de Polín as slaves. According to both Sebastián and Domingo, soon after arriving in Polín they were again taken captive when Polín was sieged by another maroon community— the Palenque de Limón.When asked by the Cartagena investigator about their role in the attacks carried out by the Palenque de Limón against nearby estancias, haciendas, and pueblos de indios after their arrival in Limón, both men state that they only participated under obligation by their “masters” [amos] in the Palenque de Limón. Sebastián Anchico, for example, recounts that “He carried the [stolen] meat for his master” [El llebo la carne para su amo...] (AGI, Patronato 234, R. 7, no. 2, 824r). This multiply translated testimony was first spoken by Sebastián Anchico and then translated orally by Sacabuche from Anchico into Spanish. Sacabuche’s account was subsequently transcribed by the notary on site into the surviving third-person testimony in the dossier.The written testimony that survives implies Sebastián Anchico’s lack of willful participation in the attack on the estancia by referencing the task he had to carry out for his owner during it. The other category invoked in Sebastián Anchico’s defense is that of having turned himself over to the Spanish soldiers as soon as they heard of the soldiers’ attack on the Palenque de Limón: “they [Sebastián and Domingo] personally turned themselves in to the whites telling them not to kill them” […ellos mismos se entregaron a los blancos disiendo que no los matase] (ibid., 324). Both examples from Sebastián Anchico’s testimony present Domingo and Sebastián as obedient servants who were involuntarily taken from their captivity in Cartagena and who chose to return to their white property owners as soon as they could. Could this shared strategy for deflecting blame and presenting the accused as posing little threat to the slave system or white property owners in Cartagena have been influenced by Andrés Sacabuche the interpreter, I asked? Comparing Sebastián’s and Domingo’s claims to innocence with those of the rest of the testimonies in the dossier not related through an interpreter demonstrates that the categories mobilized for Sebastián’s and Domingo’s defense in their declarations are not sufficiently unique to their testimonies to provide evidence that Sacabuche helped shape them. Furthermore, Sebastián’s and Domingo’s testimonies actually contradict each other regarding their conditions of recapture. Whereas Sebastián says that Domingo and he had decided to turn themselves in when they heard the Spanish soldiers were attacking the palenque, Domingo says that he was running away from the “white soldiers” [soldados blancos] when he was captured (ibid., 827r). The contradiction indexes a missed opportunity for a protective interpreter to intervene in the translation to strengthen a plea of innocence by smoothing out inconsistencies in the two stories

386

The agency of translation in colonial Latin America

given back to back on the same morning at the public jail in Cartagena. (In this case, because Domingo’s declaration comes after Sebastián’s, an omission of information about Domingo’s effort to run away from the soldiers at the moment of being recaptured would have avoided the contradiction.) Another conclusion to be drawn from Sacabuche’s participation in the trial is that, regardless of his motivations or sympathies, his presence as interpreter actually helped legitimize the executions and publicize the narrative colonial authorities wanted to tell through them. I base this argument on reading the legal trial section of the dossier in dialogue with comments made three months before the raids by Cartagena city council members about the urgent need to raze the palenques. In September of 1633, a Cartagena city council [cabildo] member argued for funding military attacks on the palenques by describing the need to enact exemplary punishment on the maroons to avoid more instances of slave insurrection and insubordination from spreading among black men and women across the city and surrounding areas: The freedom is notorious with which these fugitive maroons go about burning and destroying plantations and capturing blacks—some unwillingly some willingly—with whom they can resist with greater force and cause damages like those that have begun. Because of this, the black slaves on plantations and service slaves in this city are not safe; they are almost rebelled in thought; they are waiting to see what happens so as to flee or stay. Military intervention is so urgent and necessary that it must not be delayed because we can already see the deaths and thefts that they have begun to carry out…. […es notoria la libertad con que los negros fugitivos cimarrones andan quemando y destruyendo las estançias cogiendo los negros dellas ya de fuerça ya de grado para con mas fuerça rresistirse y hacer los daños que an comensado con que los negros de las estançias y del ceruiçio de los beçinos desta çiudad no estan seguros y ellos casi lebantados de pensamiento y a la mira del efeto desto para huirse o quedarse y es tan presisa y necesaria [la intervención militar] que no quiere punto de dilaçion porque ya bemos los daños de muertes y rrouos qve an enpesado a hacer….] (ibid., 21v) The argument made by the cabildo member identifies repressing black men’s and women’s aspirations for freedom as the principal goal of the military attacks on the palenques. The descriptions of the public punishments enacted on the recaptured maroons from the raids that resulted from the city council’s endorsement of this position should be read as orchestrated efforts to achieve this goal. By using an interpreter in the trials and executions of the recaptured maroons, the civil authorities produced a more convincing perception of the guilt of those captured. In order for the deterrent effect of punishment [escarmiento] to work, according to early modern theories of criminal justice, audiences had to believe that those who were punished were indeed guilty of a crime. For example, Covarrubias defines escarmiento as: “the warning and precaution to not err in order to not receive the punishment enacted on others” [la advertencia y recato de no errar por no incurrir en la pena, ejecutada en otros] (1611, I: 364r). Without the assumption of the guilt of the person punished, the deterrent effect of the punishment would be null and could instead become an index of the tyranny of the punisher. In the Cartagena palenque trials of 1634, the use of an interpreter to record the declarations of individuals pre-selected for public execution provided an appearance of due process that would help legitimize the violence Cartagena

387

Larissa Brewer-García

authorities were planning to enact on the recaptured maroons’ bodies. It is a legitimization for both the black population of the city (those who were supposed to be “edified” by the punishments) and the King of Spain who would receive a copy of the trial proceedings.13 Another effect of including Andrés Sacabuche in the legalizing apparatus surrounding the exemplary executions was to publicize the trial and its consequences among the black populations of the city and surrounding areas. It was well-known among the Jesuits and prominent inhabitants of Cartagena that Sacabuche and his interpreter colleagues communicated messages broadly among the black men and women of the city and provincial areas as well as among black new arrivals. Given that common knowledge, making Sacabuche participate in the trial would have been an effective means of ensuring the circulation of news about the trial and punishment among the broader population of black men and women in the city. It is furthermore likely that communicating news about the trials to the Jesuits’ slaves in particular was seen as especially urgent because in early December 1633 (a few weeks before the attacks on the palenques and month and a half before the trials of the recaptured maroons began) nine black slaves abandoned a Jesuit hacienda outside of Cartagena in an act read by the governor as an effort to join a palenque (AGI, Patronato 234, R. 7, no. 2, 7v). Rather than contest or interfere in the trial held to legitimize the executions of Domingo Anchico and Sebastián Anchico, Sacabuche’s participation helped city authorities frame the executions as a warning to discourage similar behavior in the future by black men and women in and around the city. I end this chapter with Andrés Sacabuche’s participation in the colonial legal archive as an enslaved interpreter as a reminder of the pitfalls of only gravitating to stories about translation that highlight non-European interpreters’ agency as resistance to Iberian colonial projects in the Americas. As I have mentioned here and elaborate elsewhere, Sacabuche and his interpreter colleagues had a profound influence over the narratives, objects, and language produced to support the Christian conversion of the tens of thousands of black men and women who passed through the port of Cartagena in the first half of the seventeenth century. This influence is an important way in which black intermediaries helped shape the terms of acceptance of Christianity and the meanings given to it by newly arrived black men and women. Yet in telling the story of this influence we cannot ignore the larger context of slavery and race relations in Cartagena during this period. When required to translate for the criminal trials of the maroons in 1634, for example, Andrés Sacabuche was interpolated as part of the criminal justice system intent on reminding enslaved and free black men and women around Cartagena of their inferior status to white property owners. The variegated appearance of black interpreters in the colonial archive from Cartagena de Indias does not diminish the importance of Sacabuche and his colleagues as spiritual intermediaries and linguistic interpreters. It does, however, indicate that their agency in the Jesuit evangelical project should not be extrapolated to make arguments about the broader anti-colonial intentions or effects of the interpreters’ labor. We should keep such paradoxes in mind and consider the overlapping and sometimes conflicting uses of the distinct kinds of colonial translation surveyed above when turning to translation as a lens for accessing non-European agency in colonial archives.

Archives AGI: Archivo General de Indias, Seville, Spain AHN: Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid Spain

388

The agency of translation in colonial Latin America

Notes 1 Paz attributes a psychological condition of the Mexican people to her foundational treason and victimhood (1950, 78). Alarcón (1989) traces this treatment by Paz to the mid nineteenth century and engages Paz’s argument from a Chicana feminist perspective. 2 Karttunen (1994, 1–22) had begun writing about Malintzin with a similar methodology. See Arenal and Martínez-San Miguel (2005) on images of Malintzin in the Lienzo de Tlaxcala. For a study that considers comparable figures in the Brazilian context, see Metcalf (2005). 3 The foundational studies of the use of translation in composing historical narratives in the early and mid-colonial periods are Salomon (1982); Adorno (1986, 1994); Zamora (1988). Some of the most well-known indigenous or mestizo chroniclers are Inca Garcilaso, Titu Cusi Yupanqui, and Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala from the Andes and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin, and Diego Muñoz Camargo from New Spain. Unlike most of the known indigenous or mestizo chroniclers whose work of translation involved the author’s own translation of indigenous notions of the past to the European genre of the written history, in the case of Titu Cusi’s Instrucción, there is an added layer of linguistic translation and written mediation: Titu Cusi’s orally delivered account in Quechua was interpreted out loud in Spanish by a European priest whose mestizo secretary then transcribed it. Another variation can be seen in the Codex Mendoza (1542), a multipurpose text that relates a history of the Aztec empire before Spanish arrival for a European audience (1325–1521). As Bleichmar (2015) explains, its images were first composed by two different artists and then interpreted into Nahuatl. Finally, that interpretation was rendered into Spanish. Like many of the texts of the chroniclers named above, the Codex Mendoza subsequently traveled to Europe and underwent further transformative translations in English and French. 4 Although translation itself was not a focus of analysis for Lockhart, he did examine the advent of bilingualism and what he called the changing “stages” of Nahuatl language use in the voluminous sources available for central Mexico. Several of these studies appear in Of Things of the Indies (1999). 5 For precedents from intellectual and social history, see Bustamante García (1992), López Fadul (2015), and Norton (2017). Prieto (2011) studies Jesuit priests’ collaborations with indigenous “native informants” to study plants in the New World in the mid-colonial period, but does not consider this participation through the lens of translation. 6 For earlier considerations of translation as a means of dissemination among imperial rivals in the Atlantic world, see Campos (2007) and Fuchs (2013). 7 These efforts have concentrated on Central America—with the twentieth-century studies of the Chilam Balam, the Popol Vuh, and the Florentine Codex. In the Andes a comparable text is the Manuscrito Huarochirí. Burkhart’s study built upon the scholarship of León Portilla (1958) and Klor de Alva (1988), among others. See Magaloni Kerpel (2014) on the team of native grammarians and artists who helped Sahagún compose the Florentine Codex. 8 For an excellent recent summary of scholarship on indigenous languages and historiography in the Americas, see Durston (2015). 9 See also Russo (2013) on the featherworks produced by the amatecas of Central America in the sixteenth century for evangelical purposes. The narrow definition of translation in this chapter has not allowed me to include Russo’s important book, which uses translation as a metaphor for an argument about the interpretive challenges posed by objects produced out of indigenous-Iberian colonial exchanges in the sixteenth century. Another recent book that exceeds the linguistic focus of translation of this chapter is Chakravarti’s (2018) examination of Jesuit strategies of acommodatio in Brazil and Goa. 10 See also Gómez (2017) and Redden (2013) on the relationship between the Jesuits, black slavery, and the Inquisition as an institution in Cartagena in the seventeenth century. 11 The cover letter of the dossier declares that of the 313 captured in these raids, 23 were killed.The other 280 were presumably sold into exile. Some recent studies on the Patronato de Indias 234 dossier are McKnight (2004, 2009),Vignaux (2007), Navarrete (2011), and Krug (2018). The following section is an expansion of an analysis included in Brewer-García (2020, 156–160). 12 I base this identification on the fact that the interpreter in the proceedings speaks the same languages as Andrés Sacabuche and that several of the interpreters’ testimonies in the beatification trial speak of Sacabuche’s involvement in the 1634 maroon criminal trials. 13 As evident in the frontmatter and framing of the dossier throughout, the governor and city council hoped the reports and trials contained in the dossier would prompt endorsement and even compensation for their “pacification” efforts.

389

Larissa Brewer-García

Works cited Acosta, José de. 1588. De natura novi orbis libri duo, et de promulgatione evangelii, apud barbaros, sive de procuranda indorum salute, libri sex. Salamanca: Guillelmum Foquel. ———. 1590. Historia Natural y moral de las Indias. Seville: Juan de Leon. Adorno, Rolena. 1986. Guaman Poma: Writing and Resistance in Colonial Peru. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 1994. “The Indigenous Ethnographer: The ‘Indio Ladino’ as Historian and Cultural Mediation.” In Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, edited by Stuart B. Schwartz, 378–402. New York: Cambridge University Press. Alarcón, Norma. 1989. “Traduttora, traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism.” Cultural Critique 13 (Autumn): 57–87. Arenal, Electa and Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel. 2005. “Refocusing New Spain and Spanish Colonization: Malinche, Guadalupe, and Sor Juana.” In A Companion to Literatures of Colonial America, edited by Susan Castillo and Ivy Schweitzer, 174–194. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Barros, Maria Candida D.M. 2001. The Office of Lingua: A Portrait of the Religious Tupi Interpreter in Brazil in the Sixteenth Century. Itinerario 25 (2): 110–140. Bigelow, Allison. 2017. “Imperial Translations: New World Missionary Linguistics, Indigenous Interpreters, and Universal Languages in the Early Modern Era.” In American Literature and the New Puritan Studies, edited by Bryce Traister, 93–110. New York: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2020. Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Bleichmar, Daniela. 2015. “History in Pictures: Translating the Codex Mendoza,” Art History 38 (4): 682–701. Brewer-García, Larissa. 2012.“Bodies,Texts, and Translators: Indigenous Breast Milk and the Jesuit Exclusion of Mestizos in Late Sixteenth-Century Peru.” Colonial Latin American Review 21 (3): 365–390. ———. 2016. “Imagined Transformations: Color, Beauty, and Black Christian Conversion in SeventeenthCentury Spanish America.” In Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America, edited by Pamela Patton, 111–141. Leiden: Brill. ———. 2020. Beyond Babel:Translations of Blackness in Colonial Peru and New Granada. NewYork: Cambridge. Brickhouse, Anna. 2014. The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco. New York: Oxford University Press. Brooks, George E. 2003. Eurafricans in Western Africa: Commerce, Social Status, Gender, and Religious Observance from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Athens: Ohio University Press. Burkhart, Louise. 1989. The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Bustamante García. 1992. “De la naturaleza y los naturales americanos en el siglo XVI. Algunas cuestiones críticas sobre la obra de Francisco Hernández.” Revista de Indias 52: 196–196. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge. Campos, Edmund Valentine. 2007. “West of Eden: American Gold, Spanish Greed, and the Discourses of English.” In Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, edited by Margaret R. Greer, Walter Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, 247–269. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Chakravarti, Ananya. 2018. The Empire of Apostles: Religion, Acommodatio, and the Imagination of Empire in Early Modern Brazil and India. New York: Oxford University Press. Charles, John. 2010. Allies at Odds:The Andean Church and Its Indigenous Agents. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Covarrubias, 1611. Tesoro de la lengua castellana. Madrid: Luis Sánchez. ———. 2018. Andean Cosmopolitans: Seeking Justice and Reward at the Spanish Royal Court. Austin: University of Texas Press. Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. [1632] 1991. Historia verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España. Mexico City: Alianza. Dueñas, Alcira. 2010. Indians and Mestizos in the Lettered City: Reshaping Justice, Social Hierarchy, and Political Culture in Colonial Peru. Boulder: University of Colorado Press. Durston, Alan. 2007. Pastoral Quechua:The History of Christian Translation in Colonial Peru, 1550–1650. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

390

The agency of translation in colonial Latin America ———. 2015. “Indigenous Languages and the Historiography on Latin America.” Storia della storiografia 67 (1): 51–66. Farriss, Nancy. 2018. Tongues of Fire: Language and Evangelization in Colonial Mexico. New York: Oxford University Press. Fromont, Cécile. 2014. The Art of Conversion: Christian Visual Culture in the Kingdom of Kongo. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Fuchs, Barbara. 2013. Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in Spanish Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Fuentes, Marisa. 2016. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Gómez, Pablo. 2017. The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press Greenblatt, Stephen. 1991. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Hanks,William. 2010. Converging Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press. Havik, Philip. 2012. “Gendering the Black Atlantic: Women’s Agency in Coastal Trade Settlements in the Guinea Bissau Region.” In Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500 –1800, edited by Douglass Catterall and Jodi Campbell, 315–356. Leiden: Brill. Helton, Laura, Justin Leroy, Max A. Mishler, Samantha Seely, and Shauna Sweeny. 2015. “The Question of Recovery.” Social Text 33 (4) 125: 1–18. Johnson, Walter. 2003. “On Agency.” Journal of Social History 37 (1): 113–124. Karttunen, Frances. 1994. Between Worlds: Interpreters, Guides, and Survivors. New York: Rutgers University Press. Klor de Alva, José Jorge. 1988. “Sahagún and the Birth of Modern Ethnography: Representing, Confessing, and Inscribing the Native Other.” In The Work of Bernardino de Sahagún: Pioneer Ethnographer of Sixteenthcentury Aztec Mexico, edited by José Jorge Klor de Alva, H.B. Nicholson, and Eloise Quiñones Kebe, 31–52. Albany: State University of New York. Krug, Jessica. 2018. Fugitive Modernities: Kisama and the Politics of Freedom. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. León Llerena, Laura. 2014. “Narrating Conversion: Idolatry, the Sacred, and the Ambivalences of Christian Evangelization in Colonial Peru.” In Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World, edited by Santa Arias and Raúl Marrero-Fente, 117–135. Nashville, TN:Vanderbilt University Press. León Portilla, Miguel. 1958. Ritos, sacerdotes y atavíos de los dioses. Mexico City: Universidad Autonoma de México. Lockhart, James. 1999. Of Things of the Indies: Essays Old and New in Early Latin America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. López Fadul,Valeria. 2015. “Languages, Knowledge, and Empire in the Early Modern Iberian World (1492– 1650).” PhD diss., Princeton University. Magaloni Kerpel, Diana. 2014. The Colors of the New World: Artists, Materials, and the Creation of the Florentine Codex. Los Angeles, CA: Getty Museum. Metcalf, Aline. Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500 –1600. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. McKnight, Kathryn Joy. 2004. “Confronted Rituals: Spanish Colonial and Angolan ‘Maroon’ Executions in Cartagena de Indias (1634).” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 5 (3): 1–26. ———. 2009.“Elder, Slave, and Soldier: Maroon Voices from the Palenque del Limón, 1634.” In Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550 –1812, edited by Kathryn Joy McKnight and Leo Garofalo, 64–81. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Navarrete, María Cristina. 2011. “El palenque de Limón (Cartagena de Indias, siglo XVII): El imaginario del poder y sus jerarquías.” In Visicitudes negro africanas en Iberoamérica. Experiencias de investigación, edited by Juan Manuel de la Serna Herrera, 101–134. Mexico City: UNAM. Norton, Mary. 2017. “Subaltern Technologies and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World.” Colonial Latin American Review 26 (1): 18–38. Paz, Octavio. [1950] 1986. “Los hijos de la Malinche.” In El laberinto de la soledad, 59–80. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica. Prieto, Andrés. 2011. Missionary Scientists: Jesuit Science in Spanish South America, 1570–1810. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Proceso de beatificación de Pedro Claver. 1676. Ms 218. Biblioteca Nacional de Colombia.

391

Larissa Brewer-García Puente Luna, José Carlos de la. 2014. “The Many Tongues of the King: Indigenous Language Interpreters and the Making of the Spanish Empire.” Colonial Latin American Review 23 (2): 142–170. Puente Luna, José Carlos de la. 2018. Andean Cosmopolitans: Seeking Justice and Reward at the Spanish Royal Court. Austin: University of Texas Press. Redden, Andrew. 2013. “The Problem of Witchcraft: Slavery and Jesuits in Seventeenth-Century New Granada.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 90 (2): 223–250. Restall, Matthew. 2003. “A History of the New Philology and the New Philology in History.” Latin American Research Review 38 (1): 113–134. Russo, Alessandra. 2013. The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain, 1500–1600, translated by Susan Emanuel. Austin: University of Texas Press. Salomon, Frank. 1982. “Chronicles of the Impossible: Notes on Three Indigenous Historians.” In From Oral to Written Expression: Andean Native Chroniclers of the Early Colonial Period, edited by Rolena Adorno, 9–40. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University. Sandoval, Alonso de. 1627. Naturaleza, policia sagrada i profana, costumbres i ritos, disciplina i catechismo de todos etiopes. Seville: Francisco de Lyra. Scott, David. 2004. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Scott, James C. 1992. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Splendiani, Anna Maria, José Enrique Sánchez Bohórquez, and Emma Cecilia Luque de Salazar. 1997. Estudio preliminar. Cincuenta años de inquisición en el Tribunal de Cartagena de Indias 1610–1660, Vol. 1. Bogotá: Centro editorial Javeriano, Instituto Colombiano de Cultura Hispánica. Todorov,Tzvetan. [1982] 1999. Conquest of America:The Question of the Other, translated by Richard Howard. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press. Townsend, Camilla. 2006. Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Urioste, George L. 1982. “The Editing of Oral Tradition in the Huarchirí Manuscript.” In From Oral to Written Expression: Native Andean Chronicles of the Early Colonial Period, edited by Rolena Adorno, 101– 108. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University. Vignaux, Hélène. 2007. Esclavage et rébellion: La construction sociale des Noirs et des Mulâtres (Nouvelle Grenade, XVIIe siècle). Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée. Wilde, Guillermo. 2017. “Trazos de alteridad.” In Saberes de la conversión. Jesuitas, indígenas e imperios coloniales en las fronteras de la cristiandad, edited by Guillermo Wilde, 15–30. Buenos Aires: Paradigma Inicial. Yannakakis, Yanna. 2008. The Art of Being In-between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2012. “Introduction: How Did They Talk to One Another? Language Use and Communication in Multilingual New Spain.” Ethnohistory 59 (4): 667–674. ———. 2014. “Making Law Intelligible: Networks of Translation in Mid-Colonial Oaxaca.” In Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes, edited by Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis, 79–106. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Zamora, Margarita. 1988. Language, Authority, and Indigenous History in the Comentarios reales. New York: Cambridge University Press.

392

23 INTERCULTURAL (MIS)TRANSLATIONS Colonial static and “authorship” in the Florentine Codex and the relaciones geográficas of New Spain Kelly McDonough

In this chapter, I address the complexities of communication in plurilinguistic and pluricultural contexts, specifically in New Spain (colonial Mexico). As case studies, I discuss two large-scale sixteenth-century data collection projects: the Florentine Codex (General History of the Things of New Spain) and the relaciones geográficas surveys (hereafter RGs). Although the Florentine Codex sprang from religious concerns and the RGs were concerned with the secular, both brought together large amounts of information with the ultimate goal of solidifying Church and Crown control in the colonial world. Together these sources allow for sustained consideration of the always imperfect meaning-making processes of translating languages and cultures. Both projects were collaborative endeavors between Indigenous peoples (scholars, knowledge-keepers, translators/interpreters) and Spaniards and/or criollos (American-born Spaniards), which prompts a reflection on attributions of “authorship” in these sources (note that in this chapter “author” and “authorship” are shorthand for recognized intellectual contribution).1 As a methodological intervention, I problematize the long-standing attribution of authorship of both texts to Spaniards, with Indigenous people cast in minor roles as passive “informants.” I retranslate Indigenous contributors as “co-authors” alongside their European counterparts, arguing that this new paradigm acknowledges Indigenous intellectual contribution and triggers a consideration of Indigenous motives and cultural filters at play. From this perspective, Indigenous peoples of New Spain were not simply being acted upon or extracted from; they too were trying to make sense of their “Others,” translating through their own cultural frameworks.

Pluricultural and plurilingual New Spain It is commonly thought that Spaniards immediately, and successfully, imposed their language upon Indigenous subjects and prohibited the use of Indigenous languages as part and parcel of the colonial project in New Spain.That is not the case (Lodares 2007; Bravo García 2015).When grammarian Antonio de Nebrija famously asserted “que siempre la lengua fue compañera del 393

Kelly McDonough

imperio” (“that language has always been the companion of empire”), it was in the context of a bid to convince Queen Isabella of the value of his recently completed work Gramática de la lengua castellana (1492) (Grammar of the Castilian Language). A unified language had been key for ancient empires of the past and, as he argued, could be as well for the Spanish imperial project in the future—making his grammar all the more necessary and important. While we know that Nebrija’s work went on to become influential in the so-called New World, it was not this Castilian grammar, but an earlier one on Latin, Introductiones Latinae (1481) that would make an impact. The latter, in fact, served as the universal model for the first grammars of Indigenous languages in the Americas. But as for the idea that Castilian went neatly hand in hand with Spanish conquest and colonization, that is another story altogether. During the first two centuries of colonial rule, language policies and practices in colonial Mexico were “uneven at best” (McDonough 2014, 41). This was due to the fact that Crown and Church views on the subject were rarely in concert.2 While Spanish encomenderos (possessors of encomiendas, grants of Indigenous peoples as tributaries) were initially charged with the education and evangelization of Indigenous peoples of New Spain, this untenable system was soon abolished and the task transferred to the religious orders. The friars went on to open schools for the sons of Indigenous nobles where they would learn “Christianity, good customs, civility, and the Castilian tongue” (Heath 1972, 14).3 Not surprisingly, for the most part the Spanish monarchs wished for all Indigenous subjects to learn the Castilian language (26). The Crown found it reasonable that a few select Indigenous men memorize prayers in Latin, learn the Castilian language, and later teach both Catholic doctrine and Castilian to their brethren. The Church, however, tasked with the implementation of such policies, soon realized that such a process was laborious and overly time consuming.The Catholic priests found it far more efficient to bypass Castilian altogether in favor of learning the Indigenous languages themselves, and then evangelizing in the Native tongue.As a case in point, at the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, the well-known school for the sons of Indigenous noble houses established by the Franciscans in the 1530s, Castilian figured little in the curriculum.4 King Phillip II made repeated attempts to modify language policies to reflect day-to-day life in multilingual New Spain, although often missed the mark. In 1565, he decreed that all missionaries should be proficient in the Indigenous language of the population with which they worked, incorrectly assuming that communities or regions were ethnically and linguistically uniform.5 Later, in 1570, he declared (albeit briefly) that Nahuatl was to be the official Indigenous language of New Spain, common to all Native populations (Schwaller 2012). While at first glance such a policy carried the promise of simplifying administration and evangelization, it did not take into consideration the fact that tens of thousands of Indigenous peoples did not speak or understand the lingua franca of the Aztec Empire. In the end, it would not be until the Bourbon Reforms of the eighteenth century that the Crown and Church would both agree that Castilian should be the language of all secular and religious contexts. That said, Nahuatl remained a semi-official administrative language alongside Spanish throughout the colonial period, with its use in the courts ending with Independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century. Somewhat ironically, it was only at the dawn of the independent republic of Mexico that Castilian was declared the official language of the land.

Bilingual/bicultural intermediaries Successful communication hinged upon skilled bilingual and bicultural intermediaries, often Indigenous men of some standing in their communities.6 In their roles as priests’ assistants, scholars, local politicians, interpreters, translators, and tribute collectors, they negotiated between multiple peoples across various socio-political and economic spaces (Yannakakis 2008, 4–8). 394

Intercultural (mis)translations

“As people of considerable linguistic talent, cross-cultural sensibility, and sensitivity to the subtler aspects of human communication,” observes historian Yanna Yannakakis, “intermediaries evoked a world of mobility and fluid boundaries” (4). Their ability to tack back and forth between different spheres of colonial life was indispensable. The evangelization enterprise of the Catholic Church would have been impossible without the Indigenous men who studied under and collaborated with the priests. Under the tutelage of the Franciscan friars at the above-mentioned Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco they studied the holy scripture, Latin, grammar, rhetoric, and learned to write using the Roman alphabet in their own language and in those of European origin (Kobayashi 1974; Gonzalbo 2001; Tavárez 2013). In this context they collaborated intensely with the priests in the creation of Indigenous language doctrinal materials, vocabularies, confessional manuals, sermons, religious dramas, etc., although they are seldom acknowledged; historian Mark Christensen (2013) has rightly referred to these Indigenous scholars as the “ghostwriters” of such materials. Indigenous catechists, also, were crucial in the spread of Catholicism and in helping root out heretical behaviors in Native populations. There is no doubt that alphabetic writing was imposed in some settings, to the detriment of other Native modes of communication. Yet as evidenced by the thousands of colonial manuscripts written in Indigenous languages, the Roman alphabet was also adopted and adapted with great skill by Indigenous peoples to serve their own individual and collective agendas (McDonough 2014). Native acquisition of alphabetic literacy in religious settings had effects that rippled well beyond the confines of the Church. The religious training aimed at molding Indigenous peoples into servile subjects unexpectedly resulted in the rise of influential intermediaries who moved deftly between Spanish and Indigenous worlds (Fuchs 2001, 20). Key players in local politics, Indigenous intermediaries ran interference between Indigenous cabildos (semiautonomous municipal courts) and members of the Spanish political apparatus. Legal complaints brought to the courts by Indigenous peoples relied upon the skills of the bilingual interpreter of oral testimony, translator of written documents, and scribe.7 To them fell the formidable task of making Indigenous histories—oral, written, and pictographic—linguistically and culturally “intelligible” to Spanish officials while ensuring they conformed to the rigid templates of Spanish legal documents (Valdeón 2014, 79–84; Yannakakis 2014). Since the Spanish imperial project was at its core an extractive one, Indigenous tribute collectors (tequitlatoh or tepixque) were integral to maintaining the steady flow of income, goods, and services to Indigenous leaders and Spanish authorities. Their role was to go door to door collecting the maize, monies, or other material objects from Indigenous commoners and deliver them to Indigenous officials who would take their share and then transmit what remained to Spaniards (Gibson 1964, 206–207; Lockhart 1992, 43–44). As Yannakakis (2008, 5) has pointed out, due to their collaboration with the colonizers, Indigenous intermediaries have generally been perceived negatively in the historiography.True, the political and socio-economic machine of Spanish colonial rule would not have functioned without their interventions. But their work bridging cultures also created the means for ongoing negotiations that in many situations actually favored Indigenous peoples.8

(Mis)translations: double mistaken identity, colonial static, and untranslatability Regardless of the skill of any translator/interpreter, there is no such thing as a completely commensurable translation.9 Misunderstandings—from minor to spectacular—are unavoidable. In the case of New Spain, incorrect interpretations were regular occurrences, but often relatively 395

Kelly McDonough

benign. Historian James Lockhart, for example, noted the phenomenon he called “double mistaken identity.” Indigenous people and Europeans had many analogous—but not identical— concepts and structural systems that were misinterpreted, but usually with little consequence. With “double mistaken identity,” Lockhart (1999, 99) opined that “each side of the cultural exchange presumes that a given form or concept is functioning in the way familiar within its own tradition and is unaware of or unimpressed by the other side’s interpretation.” A classic example is the mistranslation of social/geographical organizations, specifically the Nahua altepetl (city-state) and the Spanish cabecera (administrative center of a political jurisdiction). At first glance they looked to be more or less the same thing—a defined geographical space with an identifiable leader. But the Nahua altepetl was made up of several (often eight) sub-units (subaltepetl, calpolli, or barrios), each with its own tlahtoani, the dynastic titular head. Responsibilities in the altepetl rotated; each sub-unit and its tlahtoani took its turn as “head” of the altepetl. In other words, the “center” was moveable.The cabecera, however, had a fixed center with “subordinate dependencies,” governed by the corregidor from the pinnacle of a strictly vertical sociopolitical hierarchy. These are obviously two very different things, but the visible similarities gave the illusion that little needed to change, which in turn helped avoid serious confrontations; each party for the most part went about their business as usual. Lockhart was signaling the result of interferences that made intercultural understanding impossible: the conscious and/or unconscious inability to think beyond one’s own ontological and epistemological borders. I think of this interference as “colonial static,” whose noise renders a message indiscernible or invisible. Colonial static is born of an inability or conscious refusal to put into practice a protocol of relations that views another culture as coeval. In cases of double mistaken identity, neither culture suffered from misinterpretations. But poor translations can also have serious consequences, particularly when there are power differences. Along these lines, in discussions of colonial translations many scholars reference the epistemological violence that occurred because most Europeans were bound by their own worldviews when they attempted to understand Indigenous peoples and their cultures. That which did not fit in the European framework, sociologist Rolando Vázquez (2011, 36–40) observed, was deemed “untranslatable,” or unnecessary excess that was disposable.10 Because of this, Spanish translations of Indigenous culture in colonial Mexico erased with some frequency that which did not fit within Western ways of knowing and understanding the world (Villoro 1999; Mignolo 2003; Vázquez 2011). The friars, for example, wrote lengthy ethnographic studies in their drive to learn about and influence Indigenous life. Anthropologist Louise Burkhart’s (1989, 22) assessment of such ethnographies emphasizes that “much was missed or misinterpreted; European cultural categories were imposed haphazardly upon Indigenous conceptual schemes. Aspects of Native culture were sometimes redesigned as they were recorded to make them acceptable for an IndioChristian society.” But Spaniards were not the only ones trying to make sense of another culture; Indigenous peoples, too, read Europeans through their own ontological and epistemological frameworks. In her seminal book, The Slippery Earth: Nahua Christian Moral Dialogue in the Sixteenth Century (1989) Burkhart explained how Catholic religious concepts conformed to the Nahua worldview, although they were deemed close enough to Euro-Christian concepts that they created a mostly intelligible dialogue between Indigenous peoples and priests. Take the ideas of sin and guilt, central to the Euro-Christian worldview. “Nahuatl,” Burkhart points out, “had no separate term for guilt” (1989, 32–33). Thus, according to Burkhart, “the friars worked with the existing system, translating culpa as tlatlacolli (damage)” (32–33). Lockhart also called attention to how Nahuas redesigned European culture to fit their own worldview with the use of analogies and neologisms. According to Lockhart (1994, 228), “Nahuas judged what they perceived by the 396

Intercultural (mis)translations

criteria of their own culture, forcing the new into their own framework whether it fit well or not.” Two well-known examples are the Nahuatl term maçatl (deer), used in place of horse, and tepoztli (copper), standing in for iron or steel. Although the Spanish terms were soon understood, Indigenous people continued to use maçatl and tepoztli in their stead well into the second half of the 16th century (224–226). A point to consider in thinking about Indigenous filters and their work of reshaping European concepts: as far as we know, these recasts rarely resulted in negative consequences for the dominant culture. On the other hand, European/criollo (mis)translations did have damaging, and lasting, effects on Indigenous peoples. The repetition, circulation, and internalization of the abundant negative stereotypes in Spanish sources have worked to solidify and naturalize Indigenous peoples as inferior to the Europeans and their descendants.The establishment and confirmation of this hierarchy has then led to policies and practices of systematic Indigenous marginalization, discrimination, and persecution with ramifications still felt today.11 Without losing sight of the perils and pitfalls of intercultural translation, it is important to also acknowledge its positive aspects when well-intentioned parties attempt to approach another culture on its own terms. Such interactions may foment mutual understanding, respect, and even solidarity. Although good intention does not equate to perfect translations, as sociologist/legal scholar Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2006, 145) has argued, when the intended outcome is to truly try to understand each other, the potential omissions and misunderstandings can be worth the risk. All of this is to say that intercultural exchanges are always imperfect, regardless of intention. But intention does matter; it can mean the difference between being able to tune in to the message being transmitted, or making it impossible to hear. It helps, then, to ask why the languages and cultures are being translated. What is the desired outcome of these interactions? What kinds of static may the involved parties encounter, and what kinds of interference are we introducing to the analysis ourselves in the twenty-first century? In the following section I consider these questions through a discussion of the Florentine Codex and the RGs surveys. Both were European attempts to understand—or translate— Indigenous peoples and the colonial world. With the information gleaned through these projects, the priests had hoped to more effectively evangelize the Indigenous population, and in particular know the signs of incomplete or waning acceptance of Catholicism. The Crown, for its part, wished to more efficiently utilize the people, places, and things it now called its own.

The Florentine Codex (General History of the Things of New Spain) 1550s–1570s One of the most well-known projects of translating languages and cultures in colonial Mexico is the sixteenth-century Florentine Codex, a decades-long collaboration between the Franciscan friar Bernarndino de Sahagún and a host of Nahua scholars including Antonio Valeriano (Azcapotzalco); Alonso Vegerano (Cuauhtitlan); Martín Jacobita (barrio de Santa Ana); Pedro de San Buenaventura (Cuauhtitlan); Diego de Grado (Tlatelolco); Bonifacio Maximiliano (Tlatelolco); Mateo Severino (Xochimilco); and unnamed Nahua elders.The twelve-book multilingual and multimedia encyclopedic work is arguably the most comprehensive extant source treating Indigenous life before (and during) the Spanish conquest of New Spain.12 In the prologue to the entire source written by Sahagún, his stated motive for organizing this monumental work was three-fold: 1) to gain a comprehensive understanding of pre-Hispanic religion to head off the return of idolatry; 2) to create an exhaustive Nahuatl-language calepino/ vocabulario (dictionary/glossary) which would facilitate linguistic and cultural understanding among priests and Natives; and 3) to document aspects of the culture that he admired (López 397

Kelly McDonough

Austin 2011, 355).13 Sahagún likened the project to “a dragnet to bring to light all the words of this language with their exact and metaphorical meanings, and all their ways of speaking, and most of their ancient practices good and evil.” At the heart of this proto-ethnographic project was the goal of making Indigenous religious practices and general customs legible, thus ideally controllable. The Florentine Codex and its various iterations were completed in three phases over twenty years, beginning in 1558 and ending in 1578.14 What is known about the data collection process is that Indigenous leaders and elders were consulted over several years in three distinct locations, Tepepulco, Tlatelolco, and Mexico-Tenochtitlan. The Nahua scholars asked them a wide range of questions—generally thought to have been developed by Sahagún—related to their language and culture. In formulating their responses, the elders cited their amoxtli, or painted books, as well as memories of orally transmitted knowledges passed down from their ancestors. Meanwhile, the Nahua scholars recorded the Nahuatl-language responses in alphabetic script. At some point during the process—it is unclear if before, after, or during it—Indigenous tlacuiloh, painterwriters, produced some 2,500 images that complemented the alphabetic text. It is generally thought that the data collected was organized according to European conventions and translated to Spanish beginning in 1564. Although this Spanish translation has traditionally been attributed to Sahagún,Victoria Ríos Castaño (2014, 2015) has convincingly argued that the Nahua scholars participated in this phase of the project as well. Why were Nahua scholars and elders interested in participating in this project? An overlap with one or more of Sahagún’s above-mentioned motives is not unimaginable. Some may have been true believers in the new religion, or attracted to the linguistic aspects. Others were perhaps keen to master alphabetic writing while studying their own culture. Yet others may have been carrying out a type of salvage-scholarship, intent upon recovering and documenting knowledges of previous generations, much of which had gone up in smoke during the friars’ earlier Native book-burning sprees. At any rate, regardless of motive, it is important to note that the project was not just about Europeans learning as much as they could about Indigenous peoples. Throughout the process, the Indigenous elders and scholars were learning just as much about the Europeans. If Indigenous peoples were to influence in any way the emerging shape of the colonial world, they too would need to know as much as they could about the “Others’” thought and actions. Although from the process described above the knowledges encoded in the Florentine Codex are those of Nahuas, for the most part Sahagún has been considered to be the author. Notwithstanding the imminent Nahuatl literature scholar Ángel María Garibay K., his protégé Miguel León-Portilla, and certain recent studies (Terraciano 2010; Tavárez 2013; Ríos Castaño 2014) few other scholars have read the Nahua participants in the project as “co-authors.” The tradition of denying Indigenous peoples “authorship” of texts they clearly produced, as anthropologist Jane Anderson (2013) has observed, is a manifestation of Indigenous dispossession in yet another form. Assigning authorship solely to dominant-culture participants of sources with multiple authors, in Anderson’s words, “functions as a means for maintaining hierarchies of knowledge production by reducing Indigenous and non-European subjectivity and legitimating the (ongoing) appropriation of Indigenous cultural material by non-Indigenous authors” (230).The continued inability or unwillingness to view Indigenous peoples as more than inert consumables, and to assume that they require outside (Western) mediation in meaning-making processes is our own contemporary mistranslation. One of the longstanding arguments for framing the Nahua elders and scholars as serving in a passive role in the creation of the Florentine Codex is that the overall organization of the work and the questions asked appear to have been designed by Sahagún (Robertson 1965). The structure 398

Intercultural (mis)translations

of the first eleven books reflects a Euro-Christian hierarchy of beings and non-beings, beginning with God(s) and then cascading down from humans, to animals, and finally to minerals.15 For Walter Mignolo (2003, 199), this Western organization resulted “in the repression of Native categories to perform the classificatory operations.” Regardless of the limits that Sahagún’s way of organizing the world (and by extension the Florentine Codex) may have imposed, Nahua worldview is also reflected in the text. In Book 11, Earthly Things, Nahua scholars seem to have wanted to classify animals based on their dwelling places, as opposed to strictly following an Aristotelian species-driven schema of “like with like.” For example, the illustration of the tzicanantli serpent who lives near ant hills is not found with the other serpents in the text, but is instead found among the ants (López Austin 2011, 385). Although there is no extant text of the questions used to elicit information from Indigenous elders, a reverse engineering of the answers reveals patterns and the general contours of potential questions asked (365–388). These questions, as well as those that were left unasked, shaped the kinds of data collected, and thus the vision of Nahua culture we have access to today. In many ways, Western thought did indeed pre-determine representations of the Nahua world before the question-answer process even began. For all of his want of understanding the “Other,” Sahagún’s Euro-Christian paradigm of the world impeded the possibility of a complete comprehension of Nahua culture.Take the example of Book 7, The Sun, Moon, and Stars, and the Binding of the Years, which treats astronomy, astrology, and philosophy of nature. In the prologue, Sahagún laments that the entire book is of extremely poor quality. The problem was, he said, that the Natives had little understanding of the heavens and nature. But what he failed to see was that he sought Nahua conceptualizations of the heavens and nature as he understood them. How were Nahuas to have discussed such a thing with any authority or in any detail? If Sahagún’s line of questioning had been related to Nahua cosmovision, say the thirteen levels of the (supra)natural world or the World Tree extending in the four cardinal directions and their associated temperatures, Book 7 would have been infinitely more productive. The poor quality of the data in Book 7 is, as López-Austin (2011, 377) has stated, Sahagún’s failure, not that of the Native scholars. Although it would be naïve to ignore the friar’s colonial static, it would be equally so to assume that Nahuas had no influence whatsoever in the development of the questions in their dialogues with Sahagún or by remaining silent on certain matters. In the end, the question of who created the questions and how the answers were organized does not negate the fact that when all was said and done, the knowledges that made it to the page—either in alphabetic script or painted image—were of Indigenous origin. I now turn to another similarly timed collaborative project, also traditionally attributed solely to Spaniards, the 1577 relaciones geográficas surveys.

The 1577 relaciones geográficas surveys Similar to the other Spanish monarchs during the colonial period, King Phillip II never set eyes on the Americas. Like those who came before and after him, he relied on letters, chronicles, maps, and testimonies of explorers, soldiers, priests, and other officials to inform him of peoples and places across the sea. In hopes of more efficiently governing the unwieldy Spanish Empire, in 1569 King Phillip named Juan de Ovando y Godoy (1530–1575) visitador (royal inspector) to the Council of Indies. He charged Ovando with formulating recommendations for more orderly administration of the Americas. Chief among the outcomes of his observations and evaluations, Ovando presented a series of decrees that systematized the activities of the Council of Indies; dispatched Dr. Francisco Hernández to New Spain to carry out Spain’s first scientific study in the Americas; and named his secretary and protégé Juan López de Velasco chief cosmographer/ chronicler of the Council of Indies. 399

Kelly McDonough

López de Velasco is best known for his formulation of a fifty-question (actually two hundred+ bundled into fifty) survey that sought political, economic, social, and environmental data for individual regions and towns in Spanish territories.16 Responses to the survey—today known as the relaciones geográficas—were to have been the basis for an exhaustive atlas/chronicle of the empire which would inform best governance and uses of available resources. Similar to the Florentine Codex, the survey was to have functioned like a net that captured all details of colonial life. Some questions centered on pre-Hispanic life, including ancient rulers, tribute paid to them, religious practices, and social norms. Other questions dealt with land and environment, such as flora, fauna, and mineral resources.Yet others focused on the current Native inhabitants—their languages, their general health, medicinal practices, food, clothing, and so on.While the Florentine Codex was a decades-long endeavor, the data collection process for the RGs was to have been as quick, yet thorough, as possible. The survey was distributed throughout the Spanish Empire in 1577, and 206 were returned to Seville within two to three years. The majority, 163, came from New Spain.17 With few exceptions, the RGs are composites of many minds and many hands, collages of voices that register meaning-makers in the plural. The instructions to the survey stated that the local Spanish authorities were to consult the “personas inteligentes de las cosas de la tierra” (people knowledgeable of things of this land). Due to this mandate, most of the RGs show explicit collaboration with local Indigenous authorities, whose full names regularly appear in the opening paragraphs, and with some frequency their signatures alongside that of the corregidor (deputy governor) on the final page. Other participants in the process included an Indigenous language interpreter, a scribe, and occasionally a priest. Indigenous women, it should be noted, were not explicitly included in the process, and are rarely mentioned in the responses—whether due to Spanish or Indigenous cultural norms.18 That said, their absence from the archival record does not preclude their influence on events as community stakeholders. In most of the RGs the scribe states repeatedly that he is recording Indigenous voices; countless entries are prefaced with the phrase “dijeron que” and “respondieron que” (they said that, they responded that…). There is also ample reference to the Indigenous men consulting their painted books and oral histories as they generated their responses. Regardless, like the Florentine Codex, the RGs are traditionally considered Spanish texts that incidentally contain data extracted from so-called Indigenous informants. Why are the RGs not considered just as much Indigenous sources as they are Spanish/criollo? Is it because in all of the RGs the local Spanish authority’s voice opens the responses with the date, place, and participants? Perhaps it is simply a matter of convenience to acknowledge one individual as opposed to a group (as in the somewhat clunky list of Indigenous collaborators to the Florentine Codex I provided earlier). Or maybe the issue at hand is the language of the text, as in the idea that “Spanish language sources are Spanish”? But suggesting that Spanish-language sources can be also-Indigenous is anathema to many who understand “authentically Indigenous texts” to be those that reject the Roman alphabet, refuse the language of the conqueror, and/or are produced clandestinely. But who creates the rubric of authenticity, of what is and is not “authentically Indigenous”? Scholarly resistance to acknowledging Indigenous peoples as co-authors of what Cynthia Stone (2004) has called “culturally-mixed” sources directs attention to our own constructions of indigeneity, particularly the limits of our own categorical thinking which produces “untranslatables.” My own reading, which continues to meet strong resistance in mainstream Latin American literary and cultural studies circles, is that the medium, language, or level of collaboration with “the conqueror” (and the filters or censorship this implies) are all inconsequential when attributing co-authorship (or authorship) of sources to Indigenous peoples. We know that linguistic and cultural translation projects like the Florentine Codex and RGs were essential to processes of evangelization, extraction of resources, and certain levels of 400

Intercultural (mis)translations

Hispanization, but it bears repeating that Spaniards were not the only party translating, or the only ones with an agenda. In assuming that Indigenous peoples were active contributors, the need to question their rationales for participating in the project is activated. Several come to mind: 1) it was an opportunity to speak for their community; as Duccio Sacchi (2000, 304) has maintained, the process itself was an opportunity to formalize territorial order and have it duly recorded; 2) it promised access to Spanish authorities who could influence future outcomes; 3) it was a forum to demonstrate to the local community that the Spaniards recognized their authority, thus solidifying or elevating their status; 4) it was unwise to do otherwise. The leaders and elders of Cuzcaltán, for example, were threatened with a fine of 100 pesos de mina if they did not participate (a sum roughly equal to a dozen horses); and finally, 5) it was an opportunity to learn more about what was important to Spaniards, which would aid in calculating how to best manage their relationships with them. As was the case for the Florentine Codex, to a certain degree the questions of the RGs survey pre-determined the overall narrative of the people, places, and things that would emerge in the responses. For example, since there are no specific questions in the survey related to women or children, the responses paint a picture in which women and children are non-existent. Unlike the Florentine Codex, however, we have access to the precise questions posed in the survey. Therefore, it is noticeable when information was not forthcoming. Questions were routinely skipped, and more often than not, no explanation was provided for the gap. But some RGs do explain the silences. In the RGs of Chiconauhtlan and the Minas de Tasco, both corregidores explain that they cannot produce answers to many of the questions treating pre-Hispanic topics since the Natives who would know of such things are all dead and the living claim to have no recollection of such matters. Whether the six Indigenous lords of Chiconauhtlan, or the “indios más antiguos” (the most ancient Indians) who participated in the RG of the Minas de Tasco could not or did not wish to contribute the requested information remains unknown. We cannot be sure if they truly had no knowledge on the subject to convey, or if they declined to participate for some other reason. Nor can we determine if the abundance or lack of information reflected the quality of Indigenous-Spanish relationships. For example, did detailed information signal friendship between the Spanish and Indigenous men? Did silences signal fear or discord?19 In the same way that we must consider motives for participation, when the Indigenous participants are framed as active contributors we must also think of their personal and/or collective decisions about what they would and would not share. There are two obvious instances of Indigenous mistranslations in the RGs responses.The first is related to question number two: “¿Quién fue el descubridor y conquistador de la dicha provincia, y por cuya orden y mandado se descubrió, y el año de su descubrimiento y conquista, lo que de todo buenamente se pudieran saber”? (Who discovered and conquered said province, and by whose order was it discovered, and the year of its discovery and conquest, as far as can be known?). It stands to reason that the Crown sought data related to Spanish discovery and conquest, presumably to sort through the various claims of recompense put forth by conquistadors. Many responses do provide the expected information, referencing one conquistador or another. But most reach far back into pre-Hispanic history to tell the story of the first Indigenous conquerors and settlers of the land; Spaniards go unmentioned. If the Crown had hopes of sorting out whose claim to hacienda rights were legitimate, a response that four hundred years prior Axayacatl had conquered the land would not be helpful in the least. The second mistranslation is connected to question number ten, which requested a map. In the words of art historian Barbara Mundy (1996, 91), this request “was relayed as if over frayed wires, with signals delayed and scrambled, as often occurs in cross-cultural communication.” López de Velasco expected a European-style chorographic map, yet the tlacuiloh responsible for 401

Kelly McDonough

painting a large percentage of the maps did not conceive of a “map” in the same way Spaniards did, nor did they have similar representational conventions. The Native maps would not give coordinates for entering and leaving the settlement, nor did they indicate precisely where architectural features or mineral resources lay. Instead they registered visual historical narratives, lineages, and abstractions of geography. Indicative of the fact that for Spaniards these maps were untranslatable, once they made their way back across the ocean they sat ignored and gathering dust in Spanish archives for hundreds of years. We could fault Spaniards for their inability to understand the Native maps, but I cannot help but wonder what the tlacuiloh thought of Spanish cartography at the time. For shifting our view of the Indigenous individuals involved in the RGs responses from neutral, passive informants to engaged co-authors implies thinking in terms of Native concerns, desires, and of course, mistranslations.

Conclusions Negotiations, both simple and complex, between peoples of different cultures and with varying degrees of social, political, and economic power were routine occurrences in New Spain. In this “linguistic and cultural mosaic” (Mignolo 2003, 65), bilingual-bicultural intermediaries translated languages and cultures to the best of their ability.The success of such translations was inextricably linked to the rigidity or flexibility of each party’s ontological and epistemological framework.The ability and willingness to accept another culture’s view of the world is contingent upon the ability to entertain the notion that the other culture is equal to one’s own. This was often a challenge in New Spain; unyielding worldviews (colonial static) and a vertical power hierarchy affected how messages were received on both sides. Some mistranslations were relatively harmless—as in double mistaken identity—while others resulted in serious consequences. In order to draw out the inherent tensions of colonial translation, I have focused on the interplay of European-Indigenous collaborations in the Florentine Codex and the RGs. Both were attempts to bridge worlds in order to control lands, subjects, and/or souls. And both are examples of successful and unsuccessful translations between colonial subjects. By shifting our view of Native contributors to both sources from neutral assistants or passive informants to engaged co-authors, it becomes necessary to also think in terms of Native filters and mistranslations. But to do so we must address our own categorical thinking and possible inflexibilities that have interfered with recognizing Indigenous people as active producers and transmitters of knowledges. Retranslation in this context implies a careful review of how and why we have traditionally attributed authorship to dominant-culture participants in culturally mixed texts. Such efforts can and should also be extended to anthropological and linguistic studies beyond the colonial period that rely upon Native knowledges. Recognizing whose knowledges and voices are embedded in a text can potentially disrupt centuries of mistranslating academic authority as unequivocal and sole authorship. This in turn promises new readings of once-familiar sources as it opens up a cache of Indigenous voices, not only to researchers but also to Indigenous peoples today who may know little of their own history and the fascinating Indigenous men and women who created it.

Notes 1 Foucault’s intervention, of course, placed the emergence of the author as an individual assigned ownership of a work in the 19th century. 2 Philologist Eva Bravo García sees similarities in terms of Church and Crown policies during the sixteenth century (“Ambos son partidarios del cultivo de las lenguas indígenas y en ambos se produce en un determinado momento la necesidad de recurrir a la enseñanza del castellano” (2015, 130) (“both are in favor of cultivating indigenous languages, and for both there comes a time when it is necessary to

402

Intercultural (mis)translations resort to teaching Castilian”). I agree with this on principle; however, it is important to emphasize that Church and Crown positions were rarely in symphony. 3 See Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, lib.VI, tit. 1, ley 18, 1550. 4 On the Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, see Hernández and Máynez (2016). 5 See Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, lib. I, tít.VI, ley 30, 1574, 1578. 6 Spaniards/criollos and other men of mixed ancestry were also intermediaries. In this chapter, however, I am focusing on Indigenous intermediaries. 7 See Valdeón (2014) for an excellent general introduction to interpreters and translators in both New Spain and Peru. Note, however, that while Valdeón posits that women also served as court interpreters— with the daughter and granddaughter of don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza of Tlaxcala as examples (79)—there is unfortunately no evidence to support this claim. 8 My use of the term “negotiation” follows Peter Burke (2007, 9) who posits that it is a “concept which has expanded its domain in the last generation, moving beyond the worlds of trade and diplomacy to refer to the exchange of ideas and the consequent modification of meanings.” 9 It is not my intention here to discuss the vast field of translation studies; others have done so skillfully. See for example Burke (2007) and Vega Cernuda and Pulido (2013) as solid entry points. 10 The concept of untranslatability has a long history of scholarly attention. The best introduction to the concept is the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Cassin et al. 2014), wherein we find the canonical perspectives of Jakobson, Croce, Ortega y Gasset, Derrida, Benjamin, and Ricoeur, among many others. On untranslatability in colonial visual arts, see Russo (2014). 11 Of course, not all Spaniards refused or were unable to meet Indigenous culture on its own terms. As anthropologist/historian Danna Levin-Rojo (2007) has made clear, many Spaniards were in fact open to and persuaded by Indigenous modes of knowing and thinking. 12 Since the Florentine Codex is basically an encyclopedia—and an exceptionally unique one at that—the immense body of scholarship on this unparalleled source hails from nearly every conceivable discipline. For a general introduction to the source, a good place to start is León-Portilla (1999). Outside of academia, many peoples of Mexican origin in the process of recovering their Indigenous heritage (such as Danza Azteca groups) view the Florentine Codex as akin to a Bible. 13 For Sahagún’s rationale for the project, see the prologue in the Introductions and Indexes book of the Florentine Codex, 45–47. 14 Phase 1: 1558–1561,Tepepulco, Primeros memoriales (record of native testimonies based on memory and painted books); Phase 2: 1561–1563(?), Tlatelolco, Códices matritenses de la real academia / del real palacio (record of native testimonies based on memory and painted books); Memoriales con escolios (notes explaining topics and concepts in more detail); Phase 3: 1564–1578, Mexico-Tenochtitlan y Tlatelolco, Códice florentino (organization of texts according to European conventions) and La historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España (Spanish-language version). 15 According to López Austin (2011, 362–363) the organization and classificatory schemes suggest the influences of European texts including Flavio Josefo’s Arqueología, Aristotle’s Historia de los animales y las partes de los animales, works by Alberto de Colonia, Pliny’s Historia natural, and Bartolomé de Glanville’s De proprietatibus rerum. Book XII, which deals with the Spanish conquest, does not figure in the manto-mineral organization. 16 On earlier iterations of survey materials as antecedents to López de Velasco’s 1577 questionnaire, see Cline (1972, 184–190). 17 For a detailed introduction to the RGs, see Cline (1972, 183–242) and Mundy (1996, 29–59). Sánchez Martínez and Pardo Tomás (2014) is a good literature review of recent publications on the RGs. The majority of the RGs manuscripts and maps are held at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, which has 80.The Real Academia de Historia in Madrid holds 45, and the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin has 41. The RGs have been transcribed and published in stages, beginning with Marcos Jiménez de la Espada who published all but the New Spain corpus in 1881. José María Asensio published the RGs of Yucatán in the late nineteenth century, and in the early twentieth Francisco del Paso y Troncoso published most of the New Spain corpus (although some were left out due to issues of access). René Acuña’s transcriptions and introductory matter of all of the extant RGs from the 1980s remains an invaluable resource. 18 Both Spanish and Indigenous colonial cultures were marked by patriarchy. Lori Diel (2005, 102), for example, has argued in her study of the visual presence or absence of Indigenous women in Aztec (Mexica) pictorial manuscripts that “the political subordination of (Indigenous) noblewomen correlates to the growth of empire.”

403

Kelly McDonough 19 In the short term these questions may seem unanswerable, but more focused research on protagonists mentioned in the RGs (which Acuña began in his short introductions to each RG in his transcriptions) may provide insights.

Works cited Anderson, Jane. 2013. “Anxieties of Authorship in the Colonial Archive.” In Media Authorship, edited by Cynthia Chris and David A. Gerstner, 229–246. New York: Routledge. Bravo García, Eva. 2015. “Lenguas indígenas y problemas de contacto lingüístico en las relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI.” Philologia Hispalensis 2 (1): 119–132. Burke, Peter. 2007. “Cultures of Translation.” In Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, edited by Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia, 7–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burkhart, Louise M. 1989. The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Cassin, Barbara, Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra, and Michael Wood, eds. 2014. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Christensen, Mark Z. 2013. Nahua and Maya Catholicisms: Texts and Religion in Colonial Central Mexico and Yucatan. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cline, Howard F. 1972. “The Relaciones Geográficas of the Spanish Indies: 1577–1648.” In Guide to Ethnohistorical Sources, pt. 1, edited by Robert Wauchope and Howard F. Cline. Handbook of Middle American Indians, vol. 12, 183–242. Austin: University of Texas Press. Diel, Lori Boornazian. 2005. “Women and Political Power: The Inclusion and Exclusion of Noblewomen in Aztec Pictorial Histories.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 47: 82–106. Fuchs, Barbara. 2001. Mimesis and Empire:The New World, Islam, and European Identities. Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibson, Charles. 1964. The Aztecs under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gonzalbo, Pilar. 2001. Educación y colonización en la Nueva España, 1521–1821. Mexico City: Universidad Pedagógica Nacional. Heath, Shirley Brice. 1972. Telling Tongues: Language Policy in Mexico, Colony to Nation. New York: Teachers College Press, Teachers College, Columbia University. Hernández, Esther, and Pilar Máynez. 2016. El Colegio de Tlatelolco: Síntesis de historias, lenguas y culturas. Mexico City: Editorial Grupo Destiempos. Kobayashi, José María. 1974. La educación como conquista: Empresa franciscana en México. 1. ed. Nueva Serie Centro de Estudios Históricos 19. Mexico City: El Colegio de México. León Portilla, Miguel. 1999. Bernardino de Sahagún: Pionero de la antropología. Mexico City: UNAM. Levin Rojo, Danna. 2007. “Historiografía y separatismo étnico: El problema de la distinción entre fuentes indígenas y fuentes españoles.” In Indios, mestizos y españoles: Interculturalidad e historiografía en la Nueva España, edited by Danna Levin Rojo and Federico Navarrete, 21–54. Mexico City: UAM, UNAM. Lockhart, James. 1992. The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth through Eighteenth Centuries. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ———. 1994. “Sightings: Initial Nahua Reactions to Spanish Culture.” In Implicit Understanding: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, edited by Stuart B. Schwartz, 218–248. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1999. Of Things of the Indies: Essays Old and New in Early Latin American History. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lodares, Juan R. “Language, Catholicism, and Power.” In Spanish and Empire, edited by Nelsy EchávezSolano, and Kenya C. Dworkin y Méndez, 3–31. Hispanic Issues, vol. 34. Nashville:Vanderbilt University Press, 2007. López Austin, Alfredo. 2011. “Estudio acerca del método de investigación de Fray Bernardino de Sahagún.” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 42: 353–400. McDonough, Kelly S. 2014. The Learned Ones: Nahua Intellectuals in Postconquest Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Mignolo, Walter. 2003. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Mundy, Barbara E. 1996. The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and The Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

404

Intercultural (mis)translations Nebrija, Antonio de. 1681. Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias: Mandadas imprimir, y publicar por la Magestad Catolica del Rey Don Carlos II. Madrid: Ivlian de Paredes. ———. 1981 (1481). Introductiones Latinae Salmanticae. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca. ———. 1992. Gramática de la lengua castellana. Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica. Ríos Castaño,Victoria. 2014. “From the ‘Memoriales con escolios’ to the Florentine Codex: Sahagún and his Nahua assistants’ co-authorship of the Spanish translation.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 20 (2): 214–228. ———. 2015. “Sahagún’s Sixteenth-Century Translation Techniques.” Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 21 (2): 199–212. Robertson, Donald. 1965. “The Sixteenth Century Mexican Encyclopedia of Fray Bernardino de Sahagún.” Cahiers d’histoire mondiale. Journal of World History. Cuadernos de Historia Mundial 9 (1): 617–627. Russo, Alessandra. 2014. The Untranslatable Image: A Mestizo History of the Arts in New Spain. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Austin: University of Texas Press. Sacchi, Duccio. 2000. “Gathering, Organization, and Production of Information in Sixteenth-Century Surveys in Hispanic America.” Review (Fernand Braudel Center) 23 (2): 293–308. Sahagún, Bernardino de. 1975. General History of the Things of New Spain; Florentine Codex. Translated by Charles E. Dibble and Arthur J. O. Anderson. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research. Sánchez Martínez, Antonio, and José Pardo Tomás. 2014. “Between Imperial Design and Colonial Appropriation: The Relaciones Geográficas de Indias and Their Pinturas as Cartographic Practices in New Spain.” Bulletin for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies 39 (1): 1–20. Santos Sousa, Boaventura de. 2006. The Rise of the Global Left: The World Social Forum and Beyond. London: Zed Books. Schwaller, John F. 2012. “The Expansion of Nahuatl as a Lingua Franca among Priests in SixteenthCentury Mexico.” Ethnohistory 59 (4): 675–690. Stone, Cynthia L. 2004. Place of Gods and Kings: Authorship and Identity in the Relación de Michoacán. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Tavárez, David. 2013. “Nahua Intellectuals, Franciscan Scholars, and the ‘Devotio Moderna’ in Colonial Mexico.” The Americas 70: 203–235. Terraciano, Kevin. 2010. “Three Texts in One: Book XII of the Florentine Codex.” Ethnohistory 57 (1): 51–72. Valdeón, Roberto A. 2014. Translation and the Spanish Empire in the Americas. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Vázquez, Rolando. 2011. “Translation as Erasure: Thoughts on Modernity’s Epistemic Violence.” Journal of Historical Sociology 24 (1): 27–44. Vega Cernuda, Miguel Ángel, and Martha Pulido. 2013. “The History of Translation and of the Theory of Translation in the Context of  Translation Studies.” MonTi: Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación (5): 39–70. Villoro, Luis. 1999. “Sahagún o los límites del descubrimiento del Otro.” Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 29: 15–26. Yannakakis, Yanna. 2008. The Art of Being In-between: Native Intermediaries, Indian Identity, and Local Rule in Colonial Oaxaca. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2014. “Making Law Intelligible: Networks of Translation in Mid-Colonial Oaxaca.” In Indigenous Intellectuals: Knowledge, Power, and Colonial Culture in Mexico and the Andes, edited by Gabriela Ramos and Yanna Yannakakis, 79–106. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

405

24 DEFENDING THE INDEFENSIBLE Las Casas and the exceptions to sovereignty Nicole Legnani

Defense: spatial, temporal and ethical axes If the last twenty years are any indication, the invocation of the “defense of innocents” to justify the use of violence by one foreign power against another remains alive and well. Though the level of rhetorical complexity varies, in their various appeals to the nation, Bush (2003), Obama (2011), and Trump (2018) have all recurred to the trope that nation-states with greater military powers may come to the aid of peoples who are governed by tyrants—defined as those who have used or threaten to use excessive force against their own people—to justify the United States of America’s use of force against sovereign nation-states. Moreover, the appeal to innocence may occur preemptively—as in the case of Operation Iraqi Freedom initiated in 2003, and in the airstrikes directed by President Obama against Libya in 2011—or in retaliation or deterrence as with the airstrikes ordered by President Trump against Syria in 2017 and 2018. In each and every invocation of the defense of innocents, the turn to an economy of violence—which measures how much is too much in relation to an often opaque and a priori set of values— exemplifies the rationale behind these appeals to innocence and its defense, as no modern state can make the claim to a non-violent existence vis-à-vis its own citizens or subjects. Indeed, if the modern state is defined as the institution that holds the monopoly over the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory (Weber 2009, 78), it would appear that in order to abrogate a state’s local sovereignty, and render its monopoly of violence illegitimate, “the defense of innocents” must necessarily intercede on behalf of a superior power or set of values that trumps local laws and customs. More often than not, the foreign power conjures up the figure of the local tyrant, whose actions against his own people have traditionally been compared to looting and piracy. Augustine (354–430 CE) in his City of God against the Pagans (1998) likened “kingdoms without justice to bands of robbers…. If, by constant addition of desperate men, this scourge grows to such a size that it acquires territory, establishes a seat of government, occupies cities and subjugates peoples, it assumes the name of kingdom more openly” (1998, 147–148). However, Augustine’s treatment of polities governed by irrational rulers (i.e., “tyrants”) exposes an ethical vulnerability for potential invaders, especially Christian ones: the charge that profit and not concern for defenseless subjects of tyrants motivates the actions of the interventionists. More recently, the greed 406

Defending the indefensible

motivation has been a charge leveled by critics of America’s wars in the Middle East, typified by the anti-war slogan “no blood for oil” (Wenar 2016), but it has also served to interrogate the rationale behind expansionist regimes. How will foreigners who claim to unseat native rulers in the best interests of the native population ensure that they will not replace one form of “tyranny” with another? Ever since Lewis Hanke published his Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (1949), scholars of the colonial period in Latin America have grappled with the merits of and the practices behind Spanish colonialism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One of its defining features—as opposed to French or English colonialisms—was the extent to which the Spanish conquest’s legality became subject to dispute by prominent Spanish scholars at the universities of Salamanca, Alcalá de Henares and the Colegio de San Gregorio de Valladolid during the sixteenth century (Menéndez Pidal 1950, 30; Hanke 1959, 107–116). In addition to evaluating the contributions of sixteenth-century Spanish theorists, such as Francisco de Vitoria (1483– 1546), Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566), and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494–1573) to the development of international law, as it is practiced today, the debates have also led to competing visions of Spain’s moral standing in world history, even while recognizing, as Patricia Seed (1993) does, “that the belief that one nation’s characteristic forms of political domination are preferable to another’s is usually only generated out of the internal terms of the argument within a society” (651). Nonetheless, as noted by Tamar Herzog (2013), “Scholars of colonial Spanish America are divided between those who cherish Spaniards for respecting indigenous land rights and those who denounce them for not having done so. For the first group, Spanish respect was enshrined in political and theological debates and in legislation and practice that from the sixteenth century asserted that natives had rights to the lands they possessed before Europeans arrived. For the second group, native dispossession was a dominant feature of colonial life” (303). Included among Herzog’s first group of scholars can be found Rolena Adorno (2008) and Anthony Pagden (1993), with Adolfo Luis González Rodríguez (1990) and Ward Stavig (2000) in the second. In both contemporary and sixteenth-century debates surrounding the “defense of innocents,” dispossession has been interpreted politically, epistemically, but also materially. However, it has been argued by scholars within the decolonial paradigm that our understanding today is complicated by modernity’s own indebtedness—and, thus, our very consciousness—to the current world system that was produced through Iberian colonialism. Aníbal Quijano (2000) referred to this legacy at the intersection of race, capitalism, labor, and epistemic authority as “the coloniality of power,” whose mechanisms of reproduction through systems of hierarchies, knowledge, and culture have outlived the original regimes of domination and expansion inaugurated with Columbus’s first voyage. More recently, Dan Nemser (2017) in Infrastructures of Race has explored Indigenous dispossession in Mexico within the Spanish Empire, which was both capitalist and Christian, as a function of a system “which generated forms of disposability as well as paternalistic care, premised simultaneously on conversion and extraction” (12). The contradictions, and ensuing anxieties, generated by the conjunction between Christianity and early modern capitalism through the influx of New World precious metals in Spain have been explored by Elvira Vilches (2010) and, in more philosophical terms, by Orlando Bentancor (2017). My aim with this chapter is to show how Bartolomé de Las Casas’s own understanding of Indigenous dispossession by the Spanish Christian Empire became increasingly capacious over a lifetime of scholarship and activism. By thinking through the intersection of dispossession, liberty and “defensive” arguments with Las Casas, the chapter foregrounds the imbrication of Christianity, capitalism and Spanish colonialism. In conversation with Las Casas, I show how the

407

Nicole Legnani

defense of innocents, and, to a lesser extent, the defense of free movement for trade and free movement for Christian evangelization are the three juridical terms which have enjoyed the greatest privilege for overriding local sovereignty in favor of natural law, and later, universal human rights.

Defense as the best offense The firsthand accounts of conquest, discovery, pacification, or terror, whether by Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), Martín Fernández de Enciso (1470–1528), Hernán Cortés (1485– 1547), Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1490–1559), or Bartolomé de Las Casas (1484–1566) not only founded the Latin American lettered tradition around the question of Spain’s legitimate possession of the Indies (Adorno 2008), but also served as primary sources for the working definitions of terminology used by jurists, scholars, and theologians who are credited with laying down the bases for international law (Hanke 1949). Based on his readings of Cortés’s letters and the hagiographic account of the conquest of Mexico by Francisco López de Gómara (1511– 1566), Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494–1573), renowned humanist and Aristotelian scholar, celebrated Cortés and his men for liberating the Tlaxcaltecas from the tyranny of Moctecuçoma Xocoyotzin (1466–1520),1 and for defending the innocent from human sacrifices practiced by the Aztecs (Sepúlveda 1997, 44).Though Sepúlveda’s position that the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were natural slaves, in the sense explored by Aristotle (1995) in his Politics, was never fully endorsed by the Spanish Crown, his widespread influence forced official discourse to engage with Aristotelian categories of humanity. Jurists and scholars in Spanish universities, such as Salamanca or Alcalá de Henares, readily recognized the arbitrary nature of justifications for Spain’s armed appropriation of Indigenous territories in the West Indies, but they were less inclined to question the armed presence of Spanish-chartered forces, which had led to de facto dominion, with the notable exception of Las Casas and his followers. As argued by the School of Salamanca, especially with respect to the articulation of legal titles of appropriation by Francisco de Vitoria (1483–1546), the Papal Donation made to Spain and Portugal in 1494 did not constitute a legal transfer of Indigenous dominion over their communities and land to the Iberian monarchies (Schmitt 2003, 113–120).2 Vitoria (1967) contested rights of appropriation based on imperial world domination, papal world domination, the right of discovery, the rejection of Christianity, the crimes of barbarians, the free consent of Indians, and divine (providential) donation; he called these seven titles “unsuitable and illegitimate” (tituli non idonei sec legitimi). However, Vitoria (1967)’s seven “suitable and legitimate titles” of appropriation (tituli idonei ac legitimi) do provide important precedents for justifying exceptions to local sovereignty: the right to free movement for trade (jus comercii), the right to preach the faith (jus propagandae fidei), the right to protection (for Christian Indians), by papal mandate (jus mandati), as an intervention against tyranny (jus interventionis), the right to free choice (jus liberae electionis), and the right to protect one’s allies or associates (jus protectionis sociorum). These rights, Vitoria (1967) argued, could be imposed through the use of force and were, thus, a constitutive mechanism for Spanish Christian imperialism. Anghie (2007) has also traced the genealogy of the “war on terror” and free trade agreements to the original Spanish colonial paradigm of the defense of innocents against tyranny that arose out of the School of Salamanca. In principle, Vitoria (1967) rejected Sepúlveda’s arguments for Spanish titles to the West Indies that were based on Spain’s purported cultural or natural superiority, i.e., the Aristotelian argument in favor of subjugating weaker classes of humanity. However, when confronted with specific cases from the Indies, such as cannibalism or human sacrifice,Vitoria (1967)’s arguments often justified the Spanish presence in the Indies through one of the legal titles of war by appealing to the “defense of innocents,” as Del Valle (2012) has contended. Nevertheless, Adorno (2008) has emphasized 408

Defending the indefensible

that this legitimate title of war was not conceived by Vitoria as punishment for perceived crimes against natural law, such as cannibalism or human sacrifice but, she reiterates, as a defense of innocents against tyranny (109–113). Vitoria (1967) also agreed with Sepúlveda on the matter of free movement for the purposes of trade and the dissemination of the faith. Opposition to the free passage of traders and missionaries were grounds for a just cause of war. Moreover,Vitoria (1967) defended Spain’s right to intervene on behalf of those Indians who had converted to Christianity. In this way, the presence of Christian neophytes in Indigenous communities effectively circumscribed them, creating another bracketing of territory and population within the tautology of legitimate violence. Paradoxically, as Anghie (1996) has argued, jus gentium as discussed by Vitoria purported respect for local values, customs and laws, but served instead to propagate Christian, European tenets as those basic principles shared by all peoples. Namely, the invocation of rights through “natural law” imposed a standard of conduct from a Christian perspective that guaranteed universal rights, including the right to free movement across lands of different peoples and cultures for the purposes of trade and Christian evangelization. Seen in this way, Christian-inflected natural law at the roots of international law today emphasized the “universal” tributes of “all” peoples, such as their “natural” desire and right to trade their wares (jus comercii) and to move “freely” for this purpose (liberum commercium). Coupled with the Christian prerogative to move freely for the predication of the “true” faith, the School of Salamanca’s recognition (or, rather, creation) of a “universal” desire to trade, when couched in the terms of imperial respect for local mores, served as a moral buttress to practitioners of profitable violence in the Indies. Though Vitoria and others would question the “just war” rationale proffered by Sepúlveda and his supporters, their articulation of jus gentium armed missionaries and merchants with the rhetoric that whatever violence they performed in the Indies had been done either in self-defense or in the defense of innocents.

Local cosmovisions The confrontation between universally held values and local instances of tyranny almost always occurs during periods of imperial or colonial expansion during which other peoples are temporally and spatially defined vis-à-vis their invaders: before and after domination by the conquering power and within or without (both in the sense of outside of, but also lacking) the norms defining universal order. In fact, we owe the term ius or jus gentium (laws of peoples) to the Roman Empire and to the status of those “peoples” who were conquered and to whom ius civile—to which Roman citizens were subject—did not apply (Solodkow 2014, 183). This invocation of jus gentium only makes sense within an imperial context, i.e., it depends on a distinction between a “local” norm from the “supralocal” context, such as the Roman Empire, whose laws and practices of conquest bequeathed posterity with the terminology. As long as the customs of colonized or to-be-colonized peoples did not conflict with universal law, imperial magistrates were to respect local practices. Yet, as Kamari Clarke (2009) has observed in Fictions of Justice, in her analysis of the application of international human rights law in Africa today, many “laws of peoples” themselves aspire to universality, as in the case of Shariah law in Africa, which has been treated as jus gentium within the international paradigm of human rights law even though Shariah itself makes claims to universal jurisdiction. Moreover, the “laws of peoples” could refer to law and customs, but more broadly to the practices of a culture whose radical alterity exists beyond colonizers’ comprehension, but not beyond their power to proscribe. “White men saving brown women from brown men” was the phrase Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1988) famously coined in her groundbreaking essay “Can the subaltern speak?” to describe how the cause for abolition of widow sacrifice (suttee) in nineteenth-century India was employed to justify the British 409

Nicole Legnani

invasions of South Asia. Thereafter, the abolition of suttee became a civilizing mission to save innocent native women not only from native men but also from themselves. The colonizers’ push to defend native innocents against native tyrants expanded to circumscribe the widely held practices and mores of the people purportedly in need of salvation, defined as “tyranny” more broadly. What suttee would become for the British Empire in the nineteenth century may be recognized in Iberian encounters with anthropophagy and human sacrifice in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. According to Philip Boucher (1992), the “emerging concept of Carib cannibalism” and its counterpart, the docile Taino-Awarak, were instrumental to the development of laws that called for the enslavement of cannibals between 1503 and 1569 (16). If Columbus (1493) “in his widely publicized letter, created the dichotomy of the gentle, pliable Arawak and the monstrous Carib, warlike and cannibalistic,” one elaborated upon by Peter Martyr and other European writers, the Spanish “edicts in practice allowed open season on all Indians, for anyone resisting Spanish imperialism was now considered ‘Carib’” (Boucher 1992, 16–17).3 Spanish colonizers could override jus gentium out of a sense of Christian duty through the many laws promulgated with reiterated declarations of “love and charity” (amor y caridad) for the defense of the Indians, as innocents, traders, and potential Christians.The Spanish proliferation of laws regulating the Indies—revised and expanded every ten years or less in the sixteenth century—both inaugurate and exemplify the mechanism by which the exception, to recall Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) in the eighth of his Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), becomes the rule. As Daniel Nemser (2014) has argued, “this exception is not synonymous with an absence of law, as [Achille] Mbembe (2003) at times seems to suggest (25)—if anything there is a superabundance.” Faced with proliferating laws that regulated the Spanish presence and dominion in the Indies, narratives about the conquest written in retrospect often reinforced the rationale behind a legal and economic system predicated on both Indigenous dispossession and salvation.

Defending and defining origins “The problem, from the start,” according to Solodkow (2014), “was how to justify the invasion of the Americas and how to benefit from Indigenous labor without contravening either canon or natural law” (182). Building on the work done by José Antonio Saco (1932), Carlos Esteban Deive (1995), and Esteban Mira Caballos (1997) on Indigenous slavery in the West Indies, Andrés Reséndez (2016) has shown that Indigenous bondage, which included the encomienda system was—with reference to African slavery—“another slavery” for Indigenous peoples in the Americas that operated on the frontier between Spanish laws of the Indies, which regulated Indigenous liberty and labor, and their exceptions. Legally, Indians held in encomienda were distinguished from enslaved Indians, who were themselves divided into two categories prior to 1530: de iure, as captives taken from “just wars” (against, for example, the cannibals) and de rescate, through the trade of Indigenous slaves who had first been enslaved by other Indigenous people, prior to the arrival of the Spanish. In the encomienda system, Indigenous peoples gave tribute in labor or in kind to holders of encomienda (generally, former conquistadors) in exchange for Christian tutelage (Lockhart and Schwarz 1983, 138). These new subjects of the Spanish Crown, who were also Christian neophytes or potential new Christians, provided valued labor to the Spanish colonies while increasing the number of brethren in Christ.This enacted a horizontal expansion of universal Christian jurisdiction, while instituting vertical social relations between Old Christians (Europeans) and New Christians (Indigenous neophytes). As argued by María Elena Martínez (2008), this colonial hierarchy reinterpreted the old/new Christian relations on the Iberian Peninsula wherein 410

Defending the indefensible

“Spanish native” and “old Christian” were conflated against “foreigner” and “new Christian,” a dynamic that contributed to racialization processes in the New World. The encomienda system for the West Indies was promulgated by Isabel I of Castile (1451–1504) in 1503, the same year that enslavement for unnatural practices, such as cannibalism and sodomy, was prescribed. Cited in part in his Historia de las Indias (1527–1559), and in full in the Memorial de veinte remedios (1542), Las Casas (1994, 1995) traces the origin of the encomienda back to the island of Hispaniola, specifically, to a faulty reading of Isabel’s last wishes, as outlined in her instructions to Nicolás de Ovando (1460–1511), the Governor of the Indies between 1502 and 1511. If the first two categories of enslavement (through just war or by trade of the already enslaved) relied on ideas of natural slavery, implicitly or explicitly articulated, with the encomienda system, as instituted by Isabel, the forced labor of almost all Indigenous peoples would be subsumed under the logic of defense. The three categories, with some exceptions for Indigenous elites, comprised the majority of Indigenous populations. Even after Indigenous slavery was abolished in 1530 by Charles V (1500–1558), and again with the New Laws of Spain in 1542, the defense of innocents played a role in perpetuating the coloniality of social relations in the Americas. As we have seen, even these laws that abolished Indigenous slavery allowed for exceptions in the case of cannibals. Whereas Spanish policy for Indigenous enslavement prescribed the defense of innocents (against, for example, cannibals), the encomienda system confronted the concept of Indigenous tyranny in broader strokes, as part of Spain’s civilizing mission. Isabel I’s letter is worth quoting extensively as it makes policy for her new Indigenous subjects based on her economy of freedom to embrace, but not to reject Christianity. This understanding of Indigenous freedom, and its defense, later reappears in Sublimis Deus (1537), by Pope Paul III (1468–1549) which endorsed the freedom and the capacity of Indigenous peoples to convert to Christianity. However, this discourse of Indigenous freedom is double-edged, as José Rabasa (2000) has argued: Hate speech is pervasive, indeed, constitutive of colonial situations, but the implementation of colonial rule and the subordination of colonial subjects cannot be reduced to a modality of hate speech. “Love speech” is as central to colonization as spurting offensive yet injurious stereotypes. The challenge is to understand love speech as a powerful mode of subjection and effective violence.The most evident example is the declaration of love “We bring you the gift of Christ’s blood,” which is bound by the explicit obligation to accept the offering. This interpellation constitutes a form of love speech in which the threat on the Indians’ life and freedom (even when not explicit) always remains a possibility within the historical horizon if the summoning is not heeded. (6) Cited below, Isabel’s creation of the encomienda system for Indigenous neophytes in the New World explicitly delineated restraints on the freedom of Indigenous people, because they were rejecting Christianity and work for Spanish subjects. In her letter to Ovando, the Castilian queen offered an economy of liberty (too much, not enough) that favored productive communication and conversation between her Spanish and Indigenous subjects: Previously, my Lord [Ferdinand II of Aragon] and I ordered that the Indian residents and inhabitants of the Hispaniola were free and not subject to bondage in the Instructions that we sent to Sir Nicolás de Ovando, friar, and knight commander of Alcantara, when he was our Governor of the islands and mainland of the Ocean. I am now informed that, because the Indians enjoy too much liberty, they escape and avoid conversation and communication with the Christians. Even when offered wages, they do not wish to 411

Nicole Legnani

work and [instead] live like vagabonds, and thus they cannot be found in order to catechize them so that they may convert to our holy Catholic faith. For this reason, the Christians who are on this island, and live and reside there, cannot find anyone to work on their farms and their holdings. And they [the Indians] do not help them to pan and mine for gold on the island, which is detrimental to everyone. And because we wish for the aforementioned Indians to convert to our holy Catholic faith, and know its tenets, and because this can best be achieved by [enforcing] communication between the Indians and the Christians, who try to reach out to them, on that island, helping one another so that the island is cultivated, populated, and fruitful, and so that the gold there is collected, so that these my kingdoms and the neighboring ones will benefit, I outline my orders in the following Letter.4 (Por cuanto el Rey, mi señor é yo, por la instrución que mandamos dar a don frey Nicolás de Obando, comendador mayor de Alcántara, al tiempo que fue por nuestro gobernador a las islas e tierra firme del mar Océano, hobimos mandado que los indios vecinos e moradores de la isla Española fuesen libres e non suxetos a servidumbre, según más largamente en la dicha instrución [de 1501] se contiene, e agora soy informada [de] que, a cabsa de la muncha libertad que los dichos indios tienen, huyen e se apartan de la conversación e comunicación de los cristianos, por manera que, áun queriéndoles pagar sus xornales, non quieren trabaxar e andan vagamundos [sic] ni menos los puedan haber para los dotrinar e atraer a que se conviertan a nuestra sancta fe católica, e que a esta cabsa, los cristianos questán en la dicha isla e viven e moran en ella, no faltare quien trabaxe en sus granxerías e mantenimientos, nin les ayude a sacar ni coxer el oro que hay en la dicha isla, de que a los unos e a los otros vienen perxuicio, e que Nos deseamos que los dichos indios se conviertan a nuestra sancta fe católica e que sean dotrinados en las cosas della, e porquesto se podría mexor facer comunicando los dichos indios con los cristianos quen la dicha isla están, e andando e tratando con ellos e ayudándolos unos a otros para que la dicha isla se labre e pueble e abmente los frutos della e se coxa el oro quen ella hobiere para questos mis reinos e los vecinos della, sean aprovechados, mandé dar esta mi carta, en la dicha razón.) (Las Casas 1994, 1341–1342) For the sovereign, there must be material benefits in the exchanges between the Indigenous subjects (in Isabel’s letter, the natives of Hispaniola) and the Spanish Christians.Their refusal to work, especially when there are wages to be had, is for Isabel yet another sign of the excessive freedom enjoyed by her Indigenous subjects. For Isabel of Castile, an excess of liberty could be defined as refusing to listen to Christian doctrine, resisting residence among Spanish Christians, and rejecting paid work in the fields or the gold mines. Thus, the liberty to decide one’s residence, means of sustenance or interlocutors is excessive. Note that Isabel of Castile does not question the Catholic missionaries’ right to move freely for the purposes of evangelization. Indeed, as we have seen,Vitoria (1967) would later confirm the legality of using force to defend Christian missionaries against any Indigenous resistance to their unwanted presence in their own communities.

Defending the indefensible A former encomendero himself, Bartolomé de Las Casas was intimately acquainted with the encomienda system and the exceptions to jus gentium, as practiced by conquistadors and missionaries on the ground. After serving as a chaplain to conquests on the island of Cuba, and 412

Defending the indefensible

suffering a crisis of conscience, Las Casas abandoned his encomiendas and enslaved Indians in Cuba and Hispaniola in 1515, in order to advocate on Indians’ behalf before Ferdinand II of Aragon (1452–1516) in Spain (Clayton 2012, 46). Bartolomé de Las Casas had arrived in Hispaniola in 1502, and held an encomienda there and in Cuba where he also participated as chaplain in a number of expeditions, including one spearheaded by Nicolás de Ovando and another by Pánfilo de Narvaez (1478–1528) (Wagner and Parish 1967, 13–20). His conversion to Indigenous rights’ advocacy is first marked in the written record by his penning of the Memorial de Remedios para las Indias (1516). This Memorial, which is notorious for promoting the replacement of Indigenous labor with that of enslaved Africans in the Indies, was one of his first written forays into imperial policymaking and criticism. The long career of Bartolomé de Las Casas, coupled with his prolific writing, led to some perceived contradictions in his thought, especially with respect to the enslavement of Africans, due to his youthful embrace of just war doctrine and acceptance of Portuguese accounts of their encounters with the Indigenous peoples of Africa and subcontinental India. “Ironically,” as Adorno (2008) contends, “his retrospective discovery and disclosure served only to brand him, wrongly, as the author of black African slavery in the Americas” (11), an irony whose origins in mainly Anglophone historiography have been traced by Eyda Merediz and Veronica SallesReese (2008), and Lawrence Clayton (2009), though revisionist readings of Las Casas continue to have currency among hispanist scholars such as Daniel Castro (2007). During his lifetime, only the Brevísima relación de la destruición de las Indias (1552, Las Casas 2005) and the Tratados de 1552 impresos por Las Casas en Sevilla (1552, Las Casas 1992) were published, though manuscript copies of his more voluminous works, such as De unico vocationis modo omnium gentium ad veram religionem (c. 1538, Las Casas 1990), the Apologética historia sumaria (1527–1561, Las Casas 1967), and the Historia de las Indias (Las Casas 1994), may have circulated among his network of advocates for Indigenous peoples in Spain and the Americas (Wagner and Parish 1967, 288–289; Adorno 1992, 812–827).These longer works demonstrate a thorough reckoning with Aristotelian ideas on natural slavery, and Vitoria’s just titles of war, including, notably, the three defense loopholes that continue to undermine local sovereignty to the present day: the defense of innocents, the defense of free movement for evangelization, and the defense of free movement for trade. In De unico modo, his rejection of any military defense of Christian missionaries received a thorough theoretical and practical treatment. With this treatise, Las Casas (1990) aimed to reintroduce missionary work as a labor fraught with peril so as to avoid the defense of free ­movement for evangelization loophole to jus gentium. His ideal missionary would not count on armed men to guard his life, thus armed men would have no place in the social order of Tezulutlán, in Guatemala, which Las Casas renamed “Land of True Peace” (“Tierra de la Verapaz”), where he intended to reproduce Apostolic Christianity in the Indies. Thus, he proposed entering Tezulutlán, in Guatemala, a place known as “warring land” (“tierra de guerra”) by the Spanish colonizers, without any means of physical defense even though their efforts were being met with armed resistance from the Mayan peoples there. Indigenous peoples of designated warring lands were living a social death, already bracketed as slaves-to-be-captured because of their insurgency. For the Dominican missionaries in Verapaz, there were no guarantees of success and no temporal horizons to account for timely conversion. As the full title of his treatise suggests—De unico vocationis modo omnium gentium ad veram religionem (“the only way to bring all people to the true religion”)—Las Casas (1990) struggled with the “protected” status of Indigenous Christian neophytes within larger communities of Indigenous nonbelievers. His proposed method for conversion thus eschewed the legal loophole to jus gentium that would have permitted a “divide and conquer” approach. Instead, where Las Casas (1990) did turn to trade, he did so to place it at the service of missionary work within 413

Nicole Legnani

consensus-building forms of self-government in Indigenous communities. Accordingly, when he attempted to put his ideas into practice in Verapaz, Las Casas enlisted Indigenous Christian merchants, who already traded with the insurgent or “warring Indians” (“indios de guerra”), to continue trading while singing of their faith in Maya. If their professions of faith were welcomed and the community reached a consensus to invite missionaries to preach, only then would Spanish missionaries follow Indigenous traders into Verapaz. The emphasis on omnium gentium both underscored the universal ambitions of his project—Las Casas was a Christian, Dominican friar, after all—with its inherent contradictions: how to maintain the cohesion of the people, while undergoing the fracturing and denial of self that is inextricably part of the conversion process. Las Casas (1994) also addressed the free movement for trade loophole in the chapters on the Portuguese conquests in Africa (Guinea), including Columbus’s involvement in Madeira and in the enslavement trading post in Mina, in the chapters of the Historia de las Indias written after 1552. In these chapters, Las Casas leans heavily on Ásia (1552) by João de Barros (1496–1570), who published his celebration of Portuguese imperial enterprise in the same year that the Brevísima was published in Seville without the customary license, valuation of pages or censure for period publication. This reliance on Barros’s (1998) material, combined with his disputation of the Portuguese author’s celebration of the Portuguese Empire, underscores the global and trans-imperial turn that Las Casas’s approach took following the Brevísima, whose subsequent reception, translation and propagation in Protestant communities led to the creation of the Black Legend, i.e., the narrative that attributes, among other things, an exceptional nature to Spanish Catholic violence in its overseas colonies (Greer, Mignolo, and Quilligan 2007, 1–24). The Brevísima itself belies such an interpretation, since it also dedicates one chapter to the Fuggers (or Fuqueros in Spanish), the German bankers turned conquistadors in Venezuela. However, one of the main achievements of the Historia de las Indias was to widen the historical lens of colonialism to include Portuguese and French enterprises, so as to effectively contest the universalist tenets of imperialism comparatively, especially with regard to the free movement for trade loophole. For Las Casas (1994), free movement for trade was little more than an excuse for armed men to elbow their way into foreign ports. In the Historia de las Indias, he tells the story of the armada of King Manuel I of Portugal (1469–1521), which had been sent to India in 1500 (Las Casas 1994, 1227). In the first section, the narrator’s tone conforms to official discourse, including approval for the division of  “spiritual” and “material and temporal” agents among the Franciscans and mariners on the Portuguese expedition. Everything, notes Las Casas, was done per canon law, including the necessary “requisitions” (“requerimientos”), a formula that would become even more notorious in the Spanish-held Americas in the early sixteenth century.5 The Portuguese fifteenth-century requisition not only made reference to Christ’s “charity and law of love” (“caridad y ley de amor”) but also to the need to respect “commerce or exchange, which is the means by which humanity procures, fulfills and conserves peace and love, for commerce is the foundation of human civilization” (“comercio o conmutación, que es el medio por el cual se adquiere y trata y conserva la paz y amor entre todos los hombres, por ser este comercio el fundamento de toda humana policía” Las Casas 1994, 1227).6 In this way, Las Casas recognized the ethical appeal to the free movement for trade argument and seemed to validate it, as the exchanges of material goods would restrain humanity within the bounds of civilized discourse. However, he introduces the caveat, the impossibility of true dialogue in these fight or flight situations: “as long as the parties do not differ in religion and belief in the truth, for everyone is obligated to have and believe in God, in which case they could wage war ruthlessly” (“pero con que los contractantes no difieran en ley y en creencia de la verdad que cada uno es obligado a tener y creer de Dios, que en tal caso les pudiesen hacer guerra cruel a huego [sic] y a sangre,” (Las Casas 1994,1228). The 414

Defending the indefensible

phrasing “as long as the parties do not differ in religion and belief in the truth” (“no difieran en ley y en creecia de la verdad”) establishes a counterfactual; after all, it is only because these peoples are not believers that they and their lands are pursued by these commercial-military enterprises with impunity. Had the Indians been members of the Christian European community of nations, Las Casas implies, they never would have been targeted by the commercial and military enterprise of the Portuguese empire. Moreover, trade as “the foundation of human civilization” was a misnomer for material exchanges made under duress, for “even if they did not wish to, they were to trade and exchange their things for another’s, even if they had no need for them” (“aunque no quisiesen, habían de usar el comercio y trocar sus cosas por las ajenas, si no tenían necesidad dellas,” Las Casas 1994, 1228 ). In the paragraph that follows, Las Casas deals his last blow against the third exception to jus gentium, observing that the Indians of the subcontinent received the faith “by blows” (“a porradas,” Las Casas 1994, 1228). Las Casas concludes by suspecting that, much like their counterparts on the other side of the Tordesillas line, the Portuguese sought out violent resistance in order to justify the slavery of the Indigenous inhabitants of the East Indies.

Conclusions As Dipesh Chakrabarty (2002) contends, the historiographical quest for origins lures the intellectual into redacting their narration, especially when the intellectual feels implicated in the legal conservation of that foundational violence through state powers (31).This is especially true for those violent origins which have led to modernization processes with which we may identify or sympathize, such as the defense of innocents.Yet we should be wary of how the terminology employed by narrators and jurists in the sixteenth century and in the present alike have shaped the symbolic and material conditions for dispossession, especially that which is legally sanctioned by the state. In his own quest for the origins of Indigenous dispossession, which he identified with the moral and ethical scourge of his times, Las Casas wrote the Historia de las Indias to explore the contingencies of these historical developments on individual actions, even as he affirmed the role of divine providence. Increasingly, his exploration of native dispossession blurred the boundaries between state and enterprise, the East and West Indies, and among the colonial regimes we now call early modern empires. “Because they are free” (“porque son libres”) is a recurrent refrain in all the work of Las Casas to refer to the Indigenous peoples (“naturales”) of the Americas, Asia, and Africa, the peoples increasingly subject to the various yokes of European colonialism.Yet what he meant by “free” was clearly different from the ways in which his contemporaries, such as Isabel of Castile or Pope Paul II, or even our contemporaries, such as President George W. Bush (b. 1946) have referred to peoples who do not and choose not to subscribe to “our” belief systems, ways of governance, and livelihood. Instead, Las Casas (1990, 1994) proposed a radically horizontal form of dialogue in territories he chose not to visualize as bracketed for pacification—i.e., paradoxically defined as lands and peoples destined for war—but, rather, for areas that could generate true peace. Thus, Las Casas could be interpreted as one of the original thinkers of the decolonial project which, as Mignolo and Walsh (2018) contend, sought a space apart from the hierarchies that organized the systems of knowledge and culture in their reproduction of coloniality.

Notes 1 Also known as Montezuma II. 2 The so-called Papal Donation refers to the three bulls promulgated by Alexander VI (Rodrigo de Borja, 1431–1503) in 1493: Eximiae devotionis (May 3), Inter caetera (May 4) and Dudum siquidem (September 26)

415

Nicole Legnani sought to incorporate “discoveries” made by expeditions managed by the Spanish monarchs into previous schemata for conquests of terrae incognitae developed with Portuguese sovereigns in the fifteenth century. The bulls set the stage for the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494. What exactly the Pope had donated and whether he had the right to do so were questions hotly debated by Martín Fernández de Enciso (1470–1528), Juan López Palacios Rubio (Juan López de Vivero, 1450– 1524), Francisco de Vitoria, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1494–1573), and Francisco Suárez (1548–1612) to mention a few notable authors. 3 While the origins for the figures of the cannibal and the “Carib” are beyond the scope of this chapter, it should be noted that “Carib” is an amalgam of four distinct concepts: the Caribes, whom Columbus refers to in his Diario of the first voyage; the Caniba, referred to by Columbus in his Diario as “the people of the Great Khan (Gran Can)”;“cannibals” (caníbales), meaning Indigenous communities characterized as idolaters and consumers of human flesh who could not he converted; and, finally, “Carib,” which is a modern anthropological construct for Indigenous communities in lowland South America and the Windward Islands of the Caribbean Basin. See Madureira in this volume, for his discussion on the cannibal trope. 4 Unless otherwise noted, all translations and emphases are my own. 5 The Requerimiento generally refers to the document used for Spanish Conquest in the New World, a scripted performance for Indigenous enslavement or subject-making used by every conquistador, chartered by the Spanish Crown, between 1513 and 1542. 6 Las Casas (1994) concludes by referring to chapters 19, 22, 24 and 25 of the first book of his Historia de las Indias to remind his readers that Portugal initiated the process of “free” trade and evangelization in Africa (Guinea), which was later followed by Castile.

Works cited Adorno, Rolena. 1992. “Censorship and its Evasion: The Case of Fray Jerónimo Román y Zamora’s Repúblicas del mundo [1575, 1595].” Hispania 75: 812–827. ———. 2008. The Polemics of Possession in Spanish American Narrative. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Anghie, Antony. 1996. “Francisco de Vitoria and the Colonial Origins of International Law.” Social and Legal Studies 5 (3): 321–336. ———. 2007. “The Evolution of International Law: Colonial and postcolonial realities.” Third World Quarterly 27 (5): 739–753. Aristotle. 1995. Politics. Translated by Ernest Baker. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Augustine. 1998. The City of God against the Pagans, edited by R.W. Dyson. Translated by R.W. Dyson. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Barros, João de. (1552) 1998. Ásia de João de Barros: Dos feitos que os Portugueses fizeram no descobrimento e conquista dos mares e terras do Oriente: Primeira década. Lisbon: Impresa Nacional-Casa da Moeda. Benjamin, Walter. (1940) 2007. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” In Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, 253–264. New York: Shocken Books. Bentancor, Orlando. 2017. The Matter of Empire: Metaphysics and Mining in Colonial Peru. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. Bush, George W. 19 March, 2003. Operation Iraqi Freedom. Accessed May 1, 2019. https://georgewbushwhitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030319-17.html. Boucher, Philip B. 1992. Cannibal Encounters: European and Island Caribs, 1492–1763. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Casas, Bartolomé de las. (1527–1561) 1967. Apologética historia sumaria. Edited by Edmundo O’Gorman. 2 vols. Mexico City: UNAM. ———. (1518–1566) 1988. Obras completas, edited by Álvaro Huerga. 14 vols. Madrid: Alianza. ———. (c.1538-) 1990. De unico vocationis modo, edited by Paulino Castañeda Delgado. Obras completas, Vol. 2. ———. (1552) 1992. Tratados de 1552 impresos por Las Casas en Sevilla, edited by Ramón Hernández Martín and Lorenzo Galmés Mas. Obras completas,Vol. 10 ———. (1527–1559) 1994. Historia de las Indias, edited by Miguel Ángel Medina, Jesús Angel Barreda, and Isacio Pérez Fernández. Obras completas,Vols. 3–5. ———. (1516–1566) 1995. Cartas y memoriales, edited by Paulino Castañeda, Carlos de Rueda, Carmen Godínez, and Inmaculada de La Corte. Obras completas,Vol. 13.

416

Defending the indefensible ———. (1552) 2005. Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, edited by André Saint-Lu. Madrid: Cátedra. Castro, Daniel. 2007. Another Face of Empire: Bartolomé de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2002. Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Clarke, Kamari Maxine. 2009. Fictions of Justice: The International Criminal Court and the Challenges of Legal Pluralism in sub-Saharan Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clayton, Lawrence A. 2009. “Bartolomé de las Casas and the African Slave Trade.” History Compass 7 (6): 1526–1541. ———. 2012. Bartolomé de las Casas: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cortés, Hernán. 1986. Letters from Mexico. Translated by Anthony Pagden. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Deive, Carlos Esteban. 1995. La Española y la esclavitud del indio. Santo Domingo: Fundación García Arévalo. Del Valle, Ivonne. 2012. “José de Acosta, Violence in Rheotric: The Emergence of the Colonial Baroque.” Calíope: Journal of the Society for Renaissance and Baroque Hispanic Society 18 (2): 46–72. Fernández de Enciso, Martín. (1519) 1987. Suma de geografía. Madrid: Estades. Greer, Margaret Rich, Walter Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, eds. 2007. Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. González Rodríguez, Adolfo Luis. 1990. “La pérdida de la propiedad indígena: el caso de Córdoba, 1573– 1700.” Anuario de estudios americanos 47: 171–198. Hanke, Lewis. 1949. The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press. ———. 1959. Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World. London: Hollis & Carter. Herzog, Tamar. 2013. “Colonial Law and ‘Native Customs’: Indigenous Land Rights in Colonial Latin America.” The Americas 69 (3): 303–321. Lockhart, James, and Stuart Schwarz. 1983. Early Latin America: A History of Colonial Spanish America and Brazil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. López de Gómara, Francisco. 1987. La conquista de México, 16. Madrid: Historia. Martínez, María Elena. 2008. Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de sangre, Religion and Gender in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. “Necropolitics.” Public Culture 15 (1): 11–40. Menéndez Pidal, Ramón. 1950. The Spaniards in their History. Translated by Walter Starkie. London: Hollis and Carter. Merediz, Eyda M., and Verónica Salles-Reese. 2008. “Las Casas and the Legend of the Blacks” In Approaches to Teaching the Writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas, edited by Santa Arias, and Eyda M. Merediz, 177–187. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Mignolo, Walter D., and Catherine E. Walsh. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, and Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mira Caballos, Esteban. 1997. El indio antillano: repartimiento, encomienda y esclavitud (1492–1542). Seville: Muñoz Moya Editor. Nemser, Daniel. 2014. “Primitive Spiritual Accumulation and the Colonial Extraction Economy.” Política común 5. http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/pc.12322227.0005.003 ———. 2017. Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. Austin: University of Texas Press. Núnez Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar. (1555) 1998. Naufragios, edited by Juan Francisco Maura. Madrid: Cátedra. Obama, Barack. 2011. Obama White House Archives. Accessed May 1, 2019. https://obamawhitehouse. archives.gov/the-press-office/2011/03/28/remarks-president-address-nation-libya. Pagden, Anthony. 1993. European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism. New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Quijano, Aníbal. 2000. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America.” Nepantla:Views from South 1 (3): 533–580. Rabasa, José. 2000. Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier:The Historiography of Sixteenth-century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

417

Nicole Legnani Reséndez, Andrés. 2016. The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Saco, José Antonio. 1932. Historia de la esclavitud de los indios en el Nuevo Mundo seguida de la Historia de los repartimientos y encomiendas. 2 vols. Havana: Cultural, SA. Schmitt, Carl. (1950) 2003. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. Translated by G. L. Ulmen. New York: Telos. Seed, Patricia. 1993. “ ‘Are These Not Also Men?’: The Indians’ Humanity and Capacity for Spanish Civilization.” Journal of Latin American Studies 25 (3): 629–652 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de. (1544) 1997. Demócrates segundo. Obras completas, edited by Jaime Brufau Prats. Translated by Jaime Brufau Prats,Vol. 3. 16 vols. Pozoblanco, SP: Ayuntamiento de Pozoblanco. Solodkow, David M. 2014.“The Rhetoric of War and Justice in the Conquest of the Americas: Ethnography, Law, and Humanism in Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de Las Casas.” In Coloniality, Religion, and the Law in the Early Iberian World, edited by Santa Arias and Raúl Marrero-Fente, 181–199. Nashville, TN:Vanderbilt University Press. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?.” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Nelson Grossberg, 271–313. Basingstoke, UK: MacMillan Education. Stavig, Ward. 2000. “Ambiguous Visions: Nature, Law, and Culture in Indigenous-Spanish Land Relations in Colonial Peru.” Hispanic American Historical Review 80 (3): 77–111. Trump, Donald. 2018. Statement by President Trump on Syria. Accessed May 1, 2019. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-president-trump-syria/. Vilches, Elvira. 2010. New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Vitoria, Francisco de. (1538–1539) 1967. Relectio de Indis o libertad de los indios, edited by Luciano Pereña and José M. Pérez Prendes. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Wagner, Henry Raup, and Helen Rand Parish. 1967. The Life and Writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas. Santa Fe: University of New Mexico Press. Weber, Max. 2009. “Politics as a Vocation.” In From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, edited by Hans Heinrich Gerth. Translated by C.W. Mills, 77–128. New York: Routledge. Wenar, Leif. 2016. Blood Oil: Tyrants, Violence, and the Rules That Run the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

418

25 THE (DIS)CONTINUITIES OF DECOLONIZED GENDER AND SEXUAL IDENTITY IN THE ANDES Michael Horswell

One of the exciting new developments in colonial Latin American and Caribbean studies to emerge in the first part of the twenty-first century is the critical attention scholars are paying to gender and sexuality as complex markers of identity in the early modern period.The important contributions to the field differ depending on disciplinary focus, but most have in common a commitment to a post-structuralist, decolonial, intersectional rereading of foundational texts and the inclusion in the colonial canon of primary sources that were unknown or ignored by earlier generations of scholars. The fuller treatment of identity as it relates to gender and sexuality involves both the deconstruction and reinterpretation of representational language in historical and literary texts as well as a renewed consideration of the archive as a location from which to perceive a wider range of human experience. As a result, subjects of colonial history who may have been relegated to a footnote in earlier studies have begun to have fuller consideration as members of the vibrant, multi-cultural milieus of the pre-Hispanic and colonial worlds depicted in texts and other forms of historical memory. Moreover, this scholarship has opened avenues of inquiry and understanding of the contexts in which non-normative genders and sexualities were performed and how the legacies of coloniality have shaped the lived experiences of people over time and continue to shape them today. This chapter concentrates on an interdisciplinary methodology for reading the complexity of indigenous Andean gender and sexual identity in the colonial period, though the approach is applicable to other cultural regions of the Americas and beyond.Taking into consideration a transatlantic and comparative method invested in appreciating how transcultural processes of identity transformation must be decoded in order to discern historical, non-normative subjects’ (mis) representation in colonial discourse, this approach also attends to the agency indigenous subjects employed in both resisting the imposition of colonialism, and contributing to the processes of transculturation that affect to this day how autochthonous concepts are understood. Approaching colonial subjectivities in the Americas requires a double reading that takes into account dynamic indigenous cosmologies and the European paradigms that attempt to displace or absorb them, as well as African and Asian influences that often affect identity formation in the Americas. Part of the strategy must be to interrogate terms that had been naturalized in the transatlantic exchanges represented in chronicles and histories that became our written sources on pre-Hispanic and 419

Michael Horswell

colonial indigenous cultures. The language of coloniality shaped how generations of readers considered indigenous gender and sexual cultures presented mainly through the voices of the colonizer. Even the colonized indigenous voices which began to express their own versions of this history found it necessary to make intelligible to outsiders what was irreconcilable difference or what caused cultural anxiety in the dominant culture shaped by sex and gender normativity developed in the context of Catholicism and Mediterranean cultural history. Unconventional sources and a greater understanding of pre-Hispanic indigenous gender and sexual paradigms must be brought into the conversation so as to develop alternative versions of that history and open a third space for understanding that which does not fit into binary Western notions of normativity. The coloniality of power relations established in the historical colonial period continue to affect Andean peoples today, many of whom ignore their ancestors’ ways of knowing and performing gender and sexuality and who reproduce Western forms of prejudice and even violence. Lugones (2008) addressed the deficiency in our understanding of coloniality in relationship to gender systems assumed to be binary, encouraging us to “make visible the instrumentality of the colonial/modern gender system in subjecting us—both women and men of color—in all domains of existence” (1). On the other hand, from the beginning, and continuing to the present, there has been work that reflects what Catherine Walsh names “the decolonial for,” which is a form of decolonial praxis that is “… for the creation, and cultivation of modes of life, existence, being, and thought otherwise; that is modes that confront, transgress, and undo modernity/ coloniality’s hold” (2018, 18, original emphasis). As we will see throughout this chapter, these decolonial acts of being for something other than the colonial emerged simultaneously along with the invasion and shaped the contours of the processes of transculturation over time. In addition, there are still others who use research on colonial Andean gender and sexuality that emerged over the last few decades to open the door to greater agency assumed by themselves and other contemporary queer/cuir subjects who are recuperating their own history from these studies and performing identities with renewed pride fueled by struggles for liberation and selfrealization.1 How these artists deploy recuperated knowledge today requires a critical lens onto the transhistorical constructions of identity and consideration of the continuities and discontinuities of colonized and decolonized concepts related to gender and sexuality. The second part of this chapter will consider a few examples of contemporary artists and writers who are doing this decolonial work in order to “think with” them how colonial sources can be deployed as part of contemporary decolonial praxis in the specific context of peripheral sexualities and nonnormative gender performances. This approach “to think with (and not simply about) the peoples, subjects, struggles, knowledges and thought . . .” (Walsh 2018, 17) is especially important for those of us in “outsider” positions of relative privilege but whose relational identities inspire us to ally with other decolonial actors of today and better understand those of the past.

Queer tropes of gender and sexuality As I argued in Decolonizing the Sodomite: Queer Tropes of Sexuality in the Colonial Andes (Horswell 2005), Spanish colonial discourse is marked by a series of tropes of non-normative gender and sexuality, tropes that are mobilized by the early modern writers interpreting and representing Amerindian cultures throughout the hemisphere. In the chronicles, relaciones, and histories that constitute the primary sources of colonial studies (I will address the archive further below), one must problematize how the narrativization of the colonial Other’s gender and sexuality infuse observations, testimonials, and reported events in the contact zone with significance intelligible to the European reader, but often alien to the indigenous culture being represented. The truth claims imbedded in the texts are related to a colonial authority that legitimizes the writing and 420

The (dis)continuities of decolonized gender and sexual identity

respond to what Hayden White considered the latent desire to moralize the observed reality that marks the tropes written into the historical record (White 1987, 14). Each chronicler or historian’s subjectivity and place of enunciation, therefore, must be foregrounded in the analysis of indigenous identity represented in the works we read. Consequently, transatlantic reading practices become crucial in order to understand the motives behind the desire to moralize and the effects of such a posture in the works. It is necessary to examine the tradition from which the chroniclers and historians emerge as well as each writer’s relationship with the colonial apparatus. Furthermore, much of the colonial corpus has characteristics of proto-ethnography insofar as the writers attempt to represent the Other in the newly encountered Amerindian cultures; but, as James Clifford reminds us in his critique of twentieth-century ethnographies, those representations are often more analogous to inventions of cultures than transparent representations (Clifford and Marcus 1986, 2). In this “invention” of the Americas, European colonizers imposed what Michel de Certeau called a “scriptural economy” in which the Americas became the “blank page” to be filled with a Eurocentric reordering of the disparate linguistic fragments that formed the indigenous cultures disrupted by the conquistadors and evangelizers invading the hemisphere, the objects of much of colonial writing (de Certeau 1984, 134). In a colonial scriptural economy, hegemonic authority and law are inscribed on the represented bodies of the colonized; colonial morality, in de Certeau’s terms, “engraves itself on parchments made from the skin of its subjects” (140), whose bodies are “defined, delimited, and articulated by what writes [them]” (139). The native bodies that perform the identities discussed in this chapter were the sites of this scriptural violence as the colonial discourse shaped a social body in which codes purged undesirable elements from the social imaginary, and the actual physical space as well. What de Certeau termed the “machinery of representation” operates in any scriptural economy in two ways: “The first seeks primarily to remove something excessive, diseased, or unaesthetic from the body, or else to add to the body what it lacks” (147, original emphasis). Non-normative sexual and non-binary gender subjectivities were seen as dangerously “excessive” within the colonial scriptural economy in which a dimorphic gender system was privileged. To remove these excesses, their bodies were inscribed as morally diseased and degenerative to the colonial social body.The “troping” carried much of the weight of these inscriptions of unacceptable excess and served to stereotype the cultural “Other,” who, in Homi Bhabha’s terms, becomes “fixed” through the repetition of a formulaic representation, emphasizing racial and sexual difference (Bhabha 1994, 67). The “sodomy trope” was a common example of this differentiation, characterized by the various “mobilizations” of the ambiguous terms and idioms that signify “sodomy.” Definitions of the term sodomy and its derivatives gleaned from sources in the early modern period establish a variety of meanings and referents, ranging from specific sex acts deemed “unnatural” to behaviors, customs and self-presentation that suggested an understanding of sodomites as a subset of people with an identity.2 European sources consistently describe “sodomites” as a category of people who commit “abominable sins,” transgressions that ranged from same-sex sexual acts to masturbation, to bestiality, to any non-procreative sex act.3 Many indigenous men presenting as non-normative, from the European perspective of normalcy, behavior or appearance, were commonly labeled “sodomites.” The operation of establishing the fixity of the stereotype that appeared throughout the Americas was the repeated descriptions of “sodomites” as lascivious and “sinful,” and as effeminate and cross-dressers (Horswell 2005, 69–80). The meaning of these tropes was ideologically charged to justify conquest, massacres, and colonization.These ambiguous descriptions and references to indigenous non-normative gender and sexuality left in colonial discourse obscured a fuller understanding of a pre-Hispanic or post-Conquest identity, which necessitates, I argue, the methodology of recovery I outline in this chapter. 421

Michael Horswell

The second operation of the machinery of representation, according to de Certeau, is “making the body tell the code” (de Certeau 1984, 148); in the colonial context, subsequent generations of indigenous and mestizos eventually acquiesce to the norms imposed and inscribed on their bodies.They begin to perform their identities by reproducing the iterations of normativity expressed in civil codes, questionnaires, religious rituals and disciplinary practices. In the case of non-normative gender and sexual subjects, the European laws of compulsory masculinity and heteronormativity enacted on colonized Andean bodies are perpetuated into the contemporary period from these foundational moments. As de Certeau clarifies, “normative discourse ‘operates’ only if it has already become a story, a text articulated on something real and speaking in its name, i.e., a law made into a story and historicized, recounted by bodies” (149, original emphasis). The sodomy trope not only stereotypes the Other, but also functions as a “speech act” in its denunciation of the abject aspects of indigenous sexuality that Europeans deemed unacceptable. This aspect of the trope, its function as a speech act, has the unique feature of being one that “dare not speak its name,” that is, it performs as it did since its origin as a medieval Christian legacy that prohibited the mere pronunciation of the word “sodomy.” This not only adds to the ambiguity of the referents of the figures of speech used in naming the offensive behaviors, but also adds to the transculturative process of effacing what was once public performance of a subjectivity and practices that were central to pre-Hispanic Andean rituality. Normative discourse on gender and sexuality, beginning with the peninsular tradition, transformed, and was transformed by, indigenous Andeans’ practices and identity through transculturation. I re-reinterpret transculturation as a queer phenomenon in the Andes given how the sexual and gender queer bodies of the region performed vital roles in the cultural reproduction of their pre-Hispanic society while undergoing the scriptural violence of the Spanish tropes of sexuality in the colonial period and beyond (Horswell 2005). The stories “telling the code” articulated by the colonized indigenous ladino and mestizo writers were enunciated from what I characterize as the chaupi third space of Andean culture. This queer (chlullu, odd, eccentric) space functioned as a mediation between the colonizer and colonized and allowed the transculturated narrators to refashion concepts, histories, subjectivities so as to be intelligible to outsiders and yet recognizable to insiders, while at times protecting sacred conocimiento from official scrutiny (Horswell 2005, 18, 138). As in any case of transculturation, some things get lost, misrepresented, altered or erased completely, while new ways of understanding the past and present are projected onto the future. In a different study I have thought of this chaupi maneuvering by a colonial Andean narrator as a “creative heresy” that foregrounds the Otherness that a subject negotiating the inbetween spaces of transculturation expresses, especially as that performance is perceived by both their native culture and the newly dominant one (Horswell 2012, 106–108). The advantage of viewing colonial Andean culture from the perspective of the mediating chaupi is that one becomes attuned to the complementary sides of a colonial narrative, both the indigenous one with its deep cultural traditions rooted in thousands of years of changing iterations of identity and cultural practices, as well as the discursive overlay imported by the “machinery of representation” discussed above. In addition to reading colonial printed sources, which, due to a variety of circumstances, may not give the fullest accounting of the lived experience of colonial subjects performing nonnormative gender and sexuality, it is important to consider the archive as another site for understanding this history. Deborah Miranda (2010) reminds us, in her consideration of “gendercide” through the study of the colonial California archives, that “None of these archival materials came from unfiltered Indian voices; such records were impossible both because of their colonizing context and the prevalence of the oral tradition among California Indians that did not leave a textual trace” (Miranda 2010, 254). Zeb Tortorici’s Sins Against Nature: Sex and Archives in 422

The (dis)continuities of decolonized gender and sexual identity

Colonial New Spain (2018) sets the standard for how to interpret the colonial archive’s complex recording of the lives caught up in the myriad secular and ecclesiastical courts of colonial Mesoamerica. In addition to providing an expansive understanding of how the authorities of the times understood behaviors deemed to be contra natura, Tortorici foregrounds the viscerality at the center of all archival stories to reconsider how affect shapes not only the objects of our studies but also our professional practice as researchers in the archives. He theorizes that the visceral—“an abrupt, intense, intuitive gut response to some external stimulus” (Tortorici 2018, 31)—informs each element of how a historical document related to sex acts considered to be “unnatural” comes into being, from the initial witness’s reaction to the viewing of the act to the archiving of that document to the reading of the document by the modern user of the archive. Tortorici’s attention to the “corporeal, gestural and affective signs” (86) that myriad subjects produced and interpreted in order to articulate the accusations or defenses of their bodily acts provides a compelling methodology to attend to both the diverse demographics of sodomy and the reading strategies necessary to decode the archival language encountered in the cases under study. Tortorici reminds us that archives are places of absences that are seductive as well as frustrating; his ethnographic approach to the colonial archive explicates the complexities of our work in them, given the “illegibility” of historical subjects like “sodomites” that confronts the scholar and at the same time recognizes forthrightly how those absences kindle the desires that keep us searching and reading. Fernanda Molina’s recent Cuando amar era pecado: Sexualidad, poder e identidad entre los sodomitas coloniales (Virreinato del Peru, siglos XVI–XVII) (2017) explores the Andean archive to understand the experience of “sodomites” as they were represented in secular and ecclesiastical court cases in the principal jurisdictions of the Viceroyalty of Peru. Like Tortorici, her methodology also recognizes the value of considering the affective clues left in the testimonies of the archive. While Molina’s study does not address indigenous sexuality in the period, her analysis of the cases involving peninsulares and some men of the castas does help us understand the power relations that informed the same-sex relationships involved, how sodomy was related to the religious debates of the post-Tridentine era, and the problematic question of sexual identity in the period. Molina follows David Halperin’s notion of an early modern “model of pre-homosexuality” that sees the sodomite as more than just a judicial subject. Her interpretation of the cases reveals details of their lives that suggest a more expansive understanding of the contexts of the acts for which they were accused and archived (Molina 2017, 164). By rereading colonial narratives from the various loci of enunciation that constitute the corpus of historical texts, informed by a deep understanding of the cultures involved, and by approaching the archive with an eye and ear to the affective, visceral elements of the representation of non-normative sexuality, we can better appreciate the complexities of gender and sexual identity in the colonial period.

Third-gender performativity, the Andean feminine and primordial androgyny Pedro Cieza de León, one of the first chroniclers who traveled widely in Peru in the early years after the invasion, left us an expansive description of what I consider a third-gender subjectivity in the Andean region, one which performed an identity that was both ritually and socially significant to the recreation of Andean culture. Dominican friar Domingo Santo Tomás, who also spent long periods in the region, provided this report to Cieza de León. As I have explained at length (Horswell 2005, 102–104), both chroniclers had a Lascasian ideology that informed their attempt to differentiate between the Incas and their ethnic rivals. Here, and later in the Inca 423

Michael Horswell

Garcilaso’s accounting of sodomy in the Andes (Garcilaso de la Vega [1608] 1985), the behavior contra natura was rhetorically isolated to non-Incas’ cultures in order to “clean” the Incas of any suspicion that would have called into question their moral superiority in the region: It is true that as a general thing among the mountaineers and the Yungas the devil has introduced this vice under a kind of cloak of sanctity, and in each important temple or house of worship they have a man or two, or more, depending on the idol, who go dressed in women´s attire from the time they are children, and speak like them, and in manner, dress, and everything else imitate women. With these, almost like a religious rite or ceremony, on feast [days] and holidays, they have carnal, foul intercourse, especially the chiefs and headmen. I know this because I have punished two, one of them of the Indians of the highlands, who was in a temple which they call huaca, for this purpose, in the province of the Conchucos, near the city of Huánuco, the other in the province of Chincha, where the Indians are subjects of His Majesty. (Cieza de León 1553, 314) Reading through the sodomy trope that informs this colonial text, we discover that at the center of this ritual described, and perhaps the social identity represented, was a value of the feminine that, as we shall see, evoked the primordial power of androgyny in Andean cosmography. This Andean public performance of a third-gender subjectivity disrupted the Spanish semiotics of masculinity. Those described above were unintelligible subjects who perverted the orthodox signification of sexuality and resulted in a resemantization of third-gender subjects into “sodomites,” tropes that found their way into both civil legal discourse that attempted to control the native populations and the texts of ecclesiastical literature and religious performance that were the tools of evangelization. Cieza’s record of the scene of third-gender subjects in the temple is expressed in this language that attributes such behavior to the “devil” and his “idols.” This discourse eventually found its way into the Doctrina christiana (1584–1585), the first book published and printed in Peru. Christian code words and phrases were substituted in sermons, confession manuals, and catechisms to represent the moral censure of non-normative gender and sexuality like that described above (Horswell 2005, 167–229). Reading through these tropes to understand the pre-Hispanic performances behind the scriptural violence, provides evidence that feminine and gender-liminal characteristics were elicited in many ritual performances during the pre-Hispanic and colonial periods, and continue to be performed to this day. Their gender is performative in the sense that Butler explains as the “effect of a regulatory regime of gender differences in which genders are divided and hierarchized under constraint. Social constraints, taboos, prohibitions, and threats of punishment operate in a ritualized repetition of norms, and this repetition constitutes the temporalized scene of gender construction and destabilization” (Butler 1997, 16). Here, the repetition is literally “ritualized” in that the invocation of the feminine or androgynous occurs in a ceremonial context. Other sources provide a fuller picture of how the third-gender ritual subjectivity was a symbolic position in culture-producing rituals in the context of the Andean gender culture in which the feminine enjoyed autonomy, power, and respect. Sources as diverse as Jesuit Blás Valera’s De las costumbres antiguas de los naturales del Perú (1590), the anonymously indigenous authored Hurochirí Manuscript (1608), indigenous Juan de Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui’s Relación de las Antiguidades deste reyno del Perú (1613), indigenous Guaman Poma de Ayala’s Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615), and Jesuit Pablo José de Arriaga’s La extirpación de idolatría del Perú (1621), among many others, demonstrate that the feminine and the masculine were to be negotiated and mediated through signs of androgyny reminiscent of an originary, androgynous creator (Horswell 424

The (dis)continuities of decolonized gender and sexual identity

2005, 137). The evocation of gender liminality is consistent with a step in the native Andean philosophical process known as yanantin, the uniting of opposite forces (146–150). While the corporal manifestation of this in-between position varied in the distinct textual fragments of colonial discourse, the Andean third-gender subjectivity, sometimes referred to as the quariwarmi (man-woman) in Quechua, was often performed as a biologically sexed male, socially recognizable as third gender through cross-dressing, and at times by castration. Sexually passive in ritual and perhaps profane occasions, they fit into the Andean kinship system as ipas, one of the native names found in the sources, and often spoke “like women,” either in falsetto voice or by conforming with gendered linguistic rules of the Quechua or Aymara languages (110–112). Their ritual roles were often related to agriculture and to the channeling of ancestors’ voices in ceremonial contexts. In one example they seem to embody a mythic founding mother of the Inca dynasty (151–161). In another, from native scribe Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui, we learn they enjoyed supernatural sanction through myths and supernatural protection from a stellar cult figure, the Chuquichinchay. Outside the orbit of the Incas, Ana Mariella Bacigalupo (2007) found that the “co-gendered” machi weye from the Mapuche in Chile, performed a gender identity that varied between the masculine and the feminine in roles that involved both warfare and healing. The machi weye’s gender variance was respected by their communities and consistently performed in ritual contexts, though it was challenged by both early Spanish colonialists who recorded them and more recent mainstream national discourses on normative gender and sexuality. Research has demonstrated that the third-gender or alternative-gender roles found in colonial times are still performed throughout the Andes, though often modified due to the centuries of transculturation that have affected all aspects of culture in the region. For example, ritual norms still require the presence of transvested men, in both the chacrayupay (corn planting ritual) and mujonomieto (ayllu border-affirming ritual) ceremonies (Horswell 2005, 154–157). These are “temporalized scenes” of a gender subjectivity neither male nor female, but third. These performances are mythologically sanctioned attempts by Andeans at mediating between their world, kay pacha, and the worlds of their deities and between the complementary genders, the quari [man] and the warmi [woman] that at times need to invoke the androgyne to reproduce Andean culture. It is important to ask to what extent there are continuities between these ancestral forms of performing an alternative/third/transgender identity and contemporary trans identity. How can colonial studies shed light on the similarities and differences that manifest across the times between the colonial and the postcolonial? Certainly, one of the constants across time is the violence perpetrated against the people assuming these identities; just as strongly present is the deep connection the performance of difference has to mediating between reciprocal spheres of complementary gender expressions as well as between the earthly plane and the supernatural. As we will see in the next section, contemporary artists, writers, and performers are reclaiming this colonial history and giving voice to the nearly lost traditions of these pre-Hispanic and colonial subjectivities.These performances turn a decolonial mirror back on the past as well as providing for a praxis of being proudly different in the present through subjective accounts of alternative gender subjectivity that are mostly absent in the colonial corpus and archive.

Contemporary decolonial aesthetics: Travestis and the Chuquichinchay in visual and performance art Works of what we might consider “decolonial” visual art, as well as literature and performance art, like those I discuss below, have proliferated throughout the region over the last few decades. These interventions into the cultural memory of the Andes are deeply connected to the colonial 425

Michael Horswell

past, which is never quite past. The sample of works I will consider form part of the surge in decolonial aesthetics that complement the approaches of other disciplines to decolonial thought and practice. Walsh frames decoloniality as not just a method of critique but also as an approach that foregrounds the “processes and practices, pedagogies and paths, projects and propositions that build, cultivate, enable, and engender decoloniality, this understood as praxis—as walking, asking, reflecting, analyzing, theorizing, and actioning—in continuous movement, contention, relation, and formation” (Walsh 2018, 19). It befits colonial studies to consistently connect decolonial readings, like the ones discussed in the first part of this chapter, to the contemporary social actors who are performing decolonial identities informed by their own deep understanding of the colonial legacies that have shaped their subjectivities today. In what follows I will highlight two examples of this decolonial praxis that are in “movement, contention, relation, and formation” with the colonial history of non-normative gender and sexuality discussed above. What would eventually be published in book form as the Museo Travesti del Perú (2008) is an example of a decolonial aesthetic intervention in the history of the transculturation of Andean gender and sexuality. The project began circulating in 2004 as a micro museum, pop-up exhibition and performance piece whose works were cataloged and published as a book in 2008.4 Philosopher, activist, and performance artist Giuseppe Campuzano (1969–2013) created and curated visual and performative art produced by several Lima collectives, combined with historical artifacts and archival sources, to tell the history of transvestism in Peru, from pre-Hispanic to contemporary times. Campuzano stakes out his queer/cuir decolonial intentions in his book’s opening essay, “Toda peruanidad es un travestismo” [all Peruvianness is a transvestism] (Campuzano 2008, 8). As I explored in a recent essay, the project is “a gesture to recover and celebrate, to question and extend, the Baroque history of transculturation and cultural mestizaje; it is in homage to the imitative and reiterative renditions of ‘Peruvianness’—the forging of identity out of contexts of conquest and survival, colonialism and resistance, transnational capital and local entrepreneurism” (Horswell 2016, 232). Beginning with the colonial period, as we have seen in the discussion of methodology above, the subject, which eventually becomes the national subject, is bound by the colony’s, and then the nation’s, matrix of intelligible and regulated identity markers. Campuzano (2009, 2) commented in an interview, “If there were such a thing as a Peruvian essence, it would be constant metamorphosis. A Peru, an America, immersed in the transvestite processes of imposition and agency that are constitutive of its subjects.” Subjects incorporate some characteristics into their identity “performance” and exclude others.The accumulative effect of the successive reiterations of these performances creates what can be understood as a national culture and identity. Campuzano’s project is to expand that matrix to include performances excluded from the national canon while at the same time exposing the constructedness of that canon. He recuperates from colonial, nineteenth-century, and contemporary sources an expanded understanding of the continual presence of gender duality and transgender performance from the pre-Hispanic to the present times. Elsewhere I discussed how Campuzano deploys what I named a “NeoBaroque, peripheral aesthetic” (Horswell 2016) that functions as a decolonial praxis through a proliferation of techniques from the queer/cuir neobaroque repertory while also denouncing the ongoing violence to the trans community in Peru through a testimonial discourse. In this chapter, I contemplate different objects from the museum to consider how he also employs a creative juxtaposition of colonial discourse, the colonial archive, and contemporary newspaper accounts to denounce the history of violence that makes up a continuity of the transgender/travesti experience in Peru. We can appreciate how Campuzano’s deconstructive readings of the colonial canon and a visceral rereading of the archive conflate to draw our attention to both the racialized and the sexualized violence that marks this history of the nation. He also exemplifies a decolonial 426

The (dis)continuities of decolonized gender and sexual identity

praxis that insists on the ways travestis live “otherwise” and contribute to the fabric of the nation by invoking the millennial Andean tradition of the feminine and androgyne discussed earlier. In the book version of the Museo Travesti, in a section entitled “Muestrario,” Campuzano (2008) brings together a dizzying collection of artifacts ranging from representations of the third gender on pre-Colombian Moche ceramics, to references in colonial and nineteenth-century documents, to contemporary art and clothing related to transvestism, to newspaper accounts of contemporary assassinations of travestis. It is worth noting that one continuity between the book version of the museum and the way colonial texts and archives recorded the transgender experience is the decontextualization that each system of representation perpetrated on the subjects. The original exhibitions of the museum included travestis impersonating historical and cultural subjects, in what seemed like a channeling of the past to the present through bodily performances of difference, much like what the Andean huacsas did in pre-Hispanic times.5 The book version freezes those living, corporal, and almost ritual performances into the images and texts of the catalog. This effect of representation is analogous to the way colonial histories, chronicles and archives also removed from their original context the sacred (and profane) performances of third/alternative/transgender subjects, leaving them transculturated in the record. In both instances we can appreciate the losses associated with recording in a static medium the dynamic nature of gender and sexual identity. In the sequence I will concentrate on here, “Preceptiva,” the reader (and presumably the viewer of the original exhibition) is confronted with a short historical narrative on the various prohibitions of transvestism down through history from sources ranging from the Old Testament to citations of my book Decolonizing the Sodomite, to the Informe Final de la Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación (2003). Campuzano then places a photograph of a pair of used, platform high heels, named “La Carlita,” with the following caption: Still wobbly from the first hallucinogen, Diosa (goddess) stretches a leg out the car’s door. The first whistle eggs her on and her leg tattooed with crosses extends to the pavement the enormous blue platform car patpu, Legs de ZZ Top. Gemela (twin) has followed her. They rise up like the Twin Towers, becoming Siamese, now one, a goddess channeled through the spot, through the gazes of onlookers. While her once auto loses itself in the City of the Restored Balconies.6 (Campuzano 2008, 37) Like all of his poetic entries that “narrate” the museum, Campuzano’s tribute to his friend Carla Aucaylle Quispe’s shoes connects the past to the present in provocative invocations of the Andean traditional respect for gender duality and transgender performativity that was on display just prior to this section of the museum.The shoes interrupt the historical narrative of prohibition of transvestism with the fabulous scene of Carla stepping out in what Campuzano parodically called “Saturday Night Thriller,” thus restoring that sacrosanct position to the national imaginary through his micromuseum’s decolonial intervention. On the next page (and presumably on the next wall of the exhibition) are verses from Deuteronomy 22:5 and Corinthians 11:13–15, bringing into view the foundational Judeo-Christian texts prohibiting cross-dressing, followed by colonial era documents from the archive that echo those prejudices. First, is an ordenanza manuscript from 1566, with a section highlighted by Campuzano in pink, that orders the public shaming and hair-cutting of any “Indian” found cross-dressed (38). Next, is an 1803 causa that sentences prisoner Francisco Pro, who reportedly confessed to cross-dressing and was publically known as a “maricón,” to be shamed by parading him around the plaza in his transvested state and 427

Michael Horswell

after cutting his hair with scissors (39). The two-page sequence concludes with a 1966 clip from the Lima newspaper, Última hora, reporting on a police raid of a travesti party, entitled “Poli agua fiesta de vulnerables en salón de belleza” (police spoil vulnerable persons’ party in beauty salon): Fourteen “vulnerable persons” wearing wigs, many dressed as women, tried to flee through a window, while screaming hysterically. But the police from Linca’s 16th Precinct had the store surrounded […] To the sound of go-go and in an atmosphere saturated with aromatic substances, “the girls” were celebrating the installation of what they called their club “E.” The police had to break down the door. All of the “vulnerable persons,” today at noon, before being brought before the court for inciting a public scandal, will lose their heads of hair. (39) The decolonial move in this sequence makes visible the history of persecution of non-normative gender performance in the Andes while celebrating the heroic insistence of travestis and their predecessors to exist. The focus on the long hair as a marker of identity and object of punishment through time suggests a historical continuity, while the twentieth-century archive differs from the early nineteenth given the journalistic voice that reports the news with sarcasm and prejudice, but with a certain empathy absent in the judicial voice of the colonial causa. Tortorici and Molina’s appeal to affect as a method of recognition of queer/cuir subjects’ possible identity in the past, here helps us appreciate the sense of community the fourteen “vulnerable persons” had created, all gleaned from the reporter’s inclusion of details that humanize the targeted subjects of “justice,” such as the stylish music, perfumed ambiance, and celebration in a club they tried to call their own. Campuzano continues the sequence on the following pages with more entries that both humanize the contemporary travesti while reminding us of the continual violence that plagues their existence. Christian Bendayán’s 2000 painting “Todos por alguien lloramos” (We all cry for someone) is paired with a short excerpt from Mario Bellatin’s 1994 novella, Salón de belleza. Both depict the ravages of the HIV/AIDS crisis on the trans community while honoring the memory of those lost. This sense of absence of those lost is then interrupted with the full-page reproduction of Campuzano’s own national identity card, “transvested” by painting it pink and including his own travesti photo contrasted with his birth name but with the inclusion of the letter T next to his chosen travesti name. The final entry in this sequence, next to the photo of his National Identity Card (DNI), is a fragment of the Informe Final (2003) issued by the Comisión de la Verdad y Reconciliación, whose work addressed the human rights abuses that occurred during Peru’s “period of violence” and near civil war in the 1980s. The fragment depicts the murder of eight “travestis y parroquianos” in the Gardenias bar in Tarapoto on April 9, 1989 by militants of the MRTA (Túpac Amaru Revolutionary Movement). The report includes quotations taken from the MRTA’s official weekly that justified the action in order to eradicate “social pariahs” like the “homosexual, drug addict, delinquent, prostitute” (Campuzao 2008, 43). After listing the names of all eight of the victims, the report concludes with a denunciation of the MRTA’s intolerance and persecution of “sexual minorities” as a way of using popular prejudices to rally support for their cause. By including this report next to his DNI, Campuzano makes a claim for citizenship for members of the transgender community while connecting the most recent systemic violence against sexual minorities with the long history of Peruvian transphobia and homophobia. Campuzano’s juxtapositions of the performative pieces that appeal to affective solidarity with the historical record of attempts to exclude and eliminate queer/cuir subjects from the colony/nation, anticipate Tortorici’s reminder that we pay attention to the “corporeal, gestural and affective signs” 428

The (dis)continuities of decolonized gender and sexual identity

(Tortorici 2018, 86) of non-normative sexual and gender identities in the archive; the Museo Travesti fills in the absences that the archive actively constructed and appeals to a more empathetic treatment of fellow citizens who contributed to the national narrative. The processes of identification revealed in the Museo Travesti’s re-presentation of national history are moments of self-recognition in a newly recovered past by transgender subjects that, as we have seen, were marginalized and nearly erased from that history. Like narrative testimonios, Campuzano’s work speaks for a community and denounces injustices, both old and new, all the while interpolating the viewer or reader, inviting them to think with him from a decolonial space of gendered otherwise. The Museo Travesti expresses a will, in the words of John Beverley defining testimonios (Beverley 2008, 572), to “impose oneself on an institution of power and privilege from the position of the excluded, the marginal, the subaltern.” This is Campuzano and his collaborators’ decolonial praxis, an embodied critique that also forges a vision of solidarity and inclusion while re-writing the history of the nation. This critical embodiment is taken to a synthetic climax in the work of another of the members of the collective represented in the Museo Travesti, and whose work continues to challenge our limited appreciation of the place of difference the third gender represented in millennial Andean culture. Javi Nefando’s more recent photographic series,“Constelación Chuquichinchay” (2019), revives the important role the golden feline figure Chuquichinchay, protector of “hermaphrodite Indians” according to indigenous historian Juan Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui (1613), had during moments of cultural crisis and transition.7 Nefando, whose chosen last name seems to be a homage itself to the unnamable sins of his queer/cuir ancestors, digitally lays the constellation over the photograph of the body of a “sexual dissident” covered in feathers after a huayco (mudslide) has unearthed him (or buried him, depending on one’s interpretation). In the background, a mountain rises from the desert, suggestive of a huaca (sacred place; supernatural being). Nefando remarks in his artist’s note on the series that he wished to restore to our contemporary imaginary the ancient Andean connections between astronomical knowledge and sacred practices like that of the third-gender ritualist whose approaches to phenomena like disease and disaster provide productive non-western perspectives. This work activates not only the memory of these telluric modes of thinking sexuality and the cosmos, but also disrupts contemporary neoliberal discourse and the resulting management of precariousness that make unintelligible and disconnect ecological preoccupations from dissident sexualities. All of this translates into a biopolitical double play that on the one hand stigmatizes certain dysfunctional bodies in the sexual system, and on the other, covers up the critical effects on the environment or the pharmaceutical industry’s role in the outbreak of new diseases and epidemics like AIDS. (Nefando 2019) Nefando’s piece suggests not only an invocation of what may be needed in this time of continued upheaval in contemporary society (he mentions global warming and HIV/AIDS as two examples of crisis alluded to in the series), but also reminds us of the travails of all non-conforming peoples in the history of the nation. His works also make allusion to the story of the seventeenthcentury “sodomites” who were blamed for a destructive earthquake in Lima in 1687. Nefando includes a quote from the archive attributed to a Franciscan priest, Luis Galindo de San Roman, who argued that God was angry at the people of Lima: “what has Him so angry is the nefarious sin, sex with sex, women with women, and men with men” (Velazquez Castro, Marcel. 2013. La mirada de los gallinazos (266) cited in Nefando (2019)). Here, decolonial art revives from the archive a nearly forgotten past that is reminiscent of the present when more recent tragedies are 429

Michael Horswell

blamed on the queer/cuir subjects of the nation, as we saw above with the MRTA assassinations and police actions used to cleanse society of that which is deemed contra natura. Nefando’s creative use of feathers on the bodies of the sexual dissident/third-gender subject references both the sacred use of feathers that adorned the bodies of pre-Colombian leaders, shamans, and deities, while reminding us of the colonial punishments that humiliated sexual “dissidents” by parading them through the streets with their bodies covered in excrement and feathers. Campuzano and Nefando provide the contemporary scholar of colonial studies works that synthesize the complexities of the history of non-normative gender and sexuality from colonial times until today. Their interventions foreground the continuities and discontinuities of queer/cuir identities from perspectives that offer what colonial scholars often lack when examining the colonial discourse from published histories and the fragmented archive: first person accounts of how it feels to be both “queered” by the early modern authoritative discourses of church and state and “reconstructed” through postmodern academic studies. At the heart of this decolonial work is the agency of contemporary artists, scholars and performers who use their voices and bodies to express gender and sexual identities that relish in their difference, that express a life that is otherwise, in a long continuum of resistant performances that began in preHispanic times and intensified during the colonial period. Scholars of colonial Latin American studies have much to contribute to the reiterations of millennial cultural conocimientos; we also have a lot to learn from our colleagues whose reinterpretations of scholarship and original contributions to our comprehension of the historical record enrich our overall appreciation and understanding of the colonial era. Engaging with this work on its own terms also contributes to the breaking of the verticality of North-South patterns of academic production and distribution while opening the academy to non-Western epistemologies and a deeper grasp of the imbrications of identity that mark the complexity of both the past and the present.

Notes 1 I use the words queer/cuir to recognize the complexities and tensions in the North-South dialogue that has emerged around the term queer. See Viteri (2017, 407–409) for a clear explanation of the debates. Falconí Trávez et al. (2014) coined a phrase, “resentir lo queer,” as a way to problematize the use of the term by drawing on the verb’s double meaning in Spanish: re-sentir (to feel again or to feel a different way) and resentir (to resent or begrudge). Re-sentir appeals to the affects of the cultural specificity of the region which appeals to my method of reading both texts and archive in relation to non-normative sexuality and gender: “(…) nos permite analizar desde los cuerpos la compleja productividad queer en la hibrida, heterogénea y contradictoria América Latina.” (Falconí Trávez et al. 2014, 12) [“… it allows us analyze from the body the complex queer productivity in hybrid, heterogeneous, and contradictory Latin America.”] 2 See Goldberg (1991, 46) and Bhabha (1994, 66) on the ambiguity that invests these tropes with power. 3 For definitions of sodomy in the colonial Americas, see Lavrin (1989), Harrison (1993), Molina (2017), Tortorici (2018). 4 For a recent discussion of the word travesti in Latin American usage and its comparison with transvestite and transgender, see Lewis (2010, 6–7). Lewis points out that the semantic field of the word travesti is much wider than its English cognate transvestite and generally includes sense of self that is related as much to (homo)sexuality as to gender (7). Campuzano (2008) defines and uses the term travesti as embracing a wide range of trans people who have been labeled by and/or who have self-identified with myriad terms from the colonial period to the present included in an extensive glossary of the many terms used to signify gender non-conforming and peripheral sexualities in Peru (2008, 84–89). 5 Huacsas were impersonators of sacred huacas who performed during festivities to honor them and reenact their myths. 6 Translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine. 7 Javi Nefando has also used the names Javi Vargas and Javier Sotomayor. I discuss his series “La falsificación de las Tupamaro” in Horswell 2016.

430

The (dis)continuities of decolonized gender and sexual identity

Works cited Arriaga, Pablo José de. (1621) 1968. “La extirpación de la idolatría del Perú.” In Crónicas peruanas de interés indígena, edited by Francisco Esteve Barba. Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, 209, 191–278. Madrid: Atlas. Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella. 2007. Shamans of the Foye Tree: Gender, Power, and Healing among Chilean Mapuche. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Butler, Judith. 1997. “Critically Queer.” In Playing with Fire: Queer Politics, Queer Theories, edited by Shane Phelan. London: Routledge. Cieza de León, Pedro. (1553) 1959. The Incas of Pedro de Cieza de León. Translation of La crónica del Perú. Primera parte, edited by Victor Wolfgang von Hagen.Translated by Harriet de Onís. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Campuzano, Giuseppe. 2008. Museo Travesti del Perú. Lima: Institute of Development Studies. ———. 2009. “Giuseppe Campuzano and the Museo Travesti del Perú.” Interview by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes. Hemispheric Institute E-misférica 6 (2): 1–9. https://hemi.nyu.edu/hemi/en/campuzanointerview Doctrina Christiana y catecismo para instrucción de indios. (1584–1585) 1985. Facsimile of edition prepared by Antonio Ricardo. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas. Clifford, James, and George Marcus, editors. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Comisión de la Verdad y la Reconciliación del Perú. (2003). Informe final. Comisiones de la Verdad. Peru. http://www.cverdad.org.pe. de Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. Falconí Trávez, Diego, Castellanos Santiago, and Viteri María Amelia. 2014. “Resentir lo queer en América Latina: Diálogos desde/con el Sur.” In Resentir lo Queer en América Latina: Diálogos desde/con el Sur, edited by Diego Falconí Trávez, Santiago Castellanos, and María Amelia Viteri, 9–20. Barcelona: Egales Editorial. Garcilaso de la Vega, Inca. (1608) 1985. Comentarios reales, edited by Aurelio Miró Quesada. 2 vols. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho. Goldberg, Jonathan. 1991. “Sodomy in the New World: Anthropologies Old and New.” Social Text 9: 45–56. Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe. (1615) 1980. Nueva corónica y buen gobierno, edited by John V. Murra and Rolena Adorno. Translation and textual analysis of Quechua by Jorge L. Urioste. 2 vols. Mexico City: Siglo XXI. Harrison, Regina. 1993. “Confesando el pecado en los Andes: del siglo XVI hacia nuestros días.” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 19 (37): 169–185. Horswell, Michael J. 2005. Decolonizing the Sodomite: Queer Tropes of Sexuality in Colonial Andean Culture. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 2012. “Negotiating Apostasy in Vilcabamba:Titu Cusi Yupanqui Writes from the Chaupi.” Romanic Review 103 (1–2): 81–110. ———. 2016. “‘The Museum, Cross-Dressed as a Museum:’ Neo-Baroque Language and Peripheral Activist Aesthetics in El Museo Travesti del Perú.” Journal of Language and Sexuality 5 (2): 222–249. The Huarochirí Manuscript. (1608) 1991. Edited and translated by Frank Salomon and George L. Urioste. Austin: University of Texas Press. Lavrin, Asunción, editor. (1989). Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Lewis,Vek. 2010. Crossing Sex and Gender in Latin America. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lugones, María. 2008. “The Coloniality of Gender.” Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise 2: 1–17. https://doi. org/10.1007/978-1-137-38273-3_2 Mignolo,Walter D., and Catherine E.Walsh. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Miranda, Deborah A. 2010.“Extermination of the Joyas: Gendercide in Spanish California.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16 (1–2): 253–284. Molina, Fernanda. 2017. Cuando amar era pecado. Sexualidad, poder e identidad entre los sodomitas coloniales (Virreinato del Perú, siglos XVI–XVII). Lima: Instituto Francés de Estudios Andinos; La Paz: Plural Editores. Nefando, Javi. (2020, July 21). “Arqueo-Astronomía.” Javivargas.Blogspot.com, http://javivargas.blogspot. com/2017/04/arqueo-astronomia.html.

431

Michael Horswell Santa Cruz Pachacuti Yamqui, Juan de. (1613) 1993. Relación de antigüedades deste reyno del Perú, edited by Pierre Duviols and César Itier. Cuzco: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos Bartolomé de Las Casas. Tortorici, Zeb. 2018. Sins Against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Valera, Blás. (1590) 1992. “Relación de las costumbres antiguas de los naturales del Perú.” In Varios: Antigüedades del Perú, edited by Henrique Urbano and Ana Sánchez, 43–122. Madrid: Historia Viteri, María Amelia. 2017. “Intensiones: Tensions in Queer Agency and Activism in Latino América” Feminist Studies Journal 43 (2): 405–417. Walsh, Catherine E. 2018. “The Decolonial For: Resurgences, Shifts, nd Movements.” In On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis, edited by Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. White, Hayden. 1987. The Content and the Form. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

432

INDEX

Page numbers in italic indicate figures and page numbers in bold indicate tables. Acosta, José de, 172; De procuranda indorum salute, 44, 49–52, 382, 383; Historia natural y moral de las Indias, 173, 382; racialization and, 44, 49–52; Sandoval, Alonso de, and, 382 Adorno, Rolena, 6, 9, 17, 62, 381 Age of Revolutions, 8–9 Alcoff, Linda Martin, 282 Alpers, Svetlana, 313 Alva Ixtlilxochitl, Fernando de, 5, 62, 234, 303 Alvarado Tezozomoc, Hernando de, 5, 62 Amador de los Ríos, José, 9, 236–237 Amauta (magazine), 11 Americanness, 12 Amerindian origins: critique of theories of, 170–176; Llano Zapata, José Eusebio, and, 177–178 Andrade, Oswald de, 12, 184, 185–195 Anghie, Antony, 408, 409 Angulo Íñiguez, Diego, 309–310, 311, 313 Anthropocene, 24, 134, 139, 262 anthropophagy, 183–195, 299, 410 antropofagia (cannibalism), 184–195; “cannibal cogito” and, 186–190; exocannibalism, 188; gender and sexual cannibalism, 192–195; Manifesto antropófago (Cannibalist Manifesto) (Andrade), 184–195; perspectivism and, 190–192; Revista de Antropofagia, 184, 186; trope of, 184–186 Appadurai, Arjun, 251 archival turn, 302, 322

archives, 22, 295–304; archival dispossession, 297–299; archival reading and archival writing, 303–304; archival reinvention, 302–303; archival ruins, 300–302; Archivo General de Indias (Seville, Spain), 234, 302, 304, 323, 385; Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires, (AGNA), 337–338; Archivo Histórico Nacional (Madrid Spain), 383; Archivo Histórico Nacional de Ecuador (AHNE), 334; art and, 314, 317, 322–323 Arens, William, 183 Arias, Santa, 4, 5, 16, 235, 267, 299, 345 Arias Montano, Benito, 175–176 Armitage, David, 10 art see materialities and art Aztlán, 14 Bacigalupo, Ana Mariella, 425 Bacon, Francis, 170 Balbuena, Bernardo de, 86, 283, 284–285 Bal, Mieke, 20 Barad, Karen, 251 Barragán, Rossana, 73, 75 Baroque, 11–12, 86, 156, 250, 285; art, 250, 311, 315–316; Barroco americano, 11; Barroco de Indias, 11, 12; Barroco indiano, 11; Barroco indígena, 11; Barroco latinoamericano, 12; decolonial aesthetics and, 426; festival, 291; intellectuals, 284; see also neobaroque Barrios, Marta Milena, 140 Bastian, Jeanette A., 22

433

Index Bauer, Ralph, 25, 350 Beauvoir, Simone de, 251 Behn, Aphra, 133 Bellini, Guiseppe, 6 Bello, Andrés, 86; Biblioteca Americana, 8–9; Repertorio Americano, 8–9 Benítez Rojo, Antonio, 12, 240–241 Benjamin, Walter, 297, 410 Bennett, Herman, 22, 24, 66 Bennett, Jane, 251, 256 Bentancor, Orlando, 253, 407 Berger, John, 147 Beyersdorff, Margot, 254 Bhabha, Homi, 17, 314, 421 Bigelow, Allison, 253, 381 Bingham, Hiram, 11, 268 Black intellectuals, 65–67 Black Legend, 22, 45, 363–364, 365, 369–371, 414 Bleichmar, Daniela, 262 Boazio, Baptista, 142–144, 143 Boccara, Guillaume, 75 Bolívar, Simón, 8, 94, 140, 234, 235 Bollaín, Icíar, 154–156 Bolton, Herbert, 8 Boone, Elizabeth Hill, 6, 64–65, 106, 273 Boruchoff, David A., 25 Boucher, Philip, 183, 184, 410 Bourbon Reforms, 74, 92, 394 Braidotti, Rosi, 251 Branche, Jerome, 239 Breglia, Lisa, 269–270 Brewer-García, Larissa, 22, 65 Brickhouse, Anna, 380–382 Brokaw, Galen, 253 Brown, Bill, 251, 316 Brown, Jonathan, 313 Bruce-Novoa, Juan, 14 Bry, Theodor de, 139, 195, 367–368, 368, 369 Bullock, William, 310 Burkhart, Louise, 381–382, 396 Butler, Judith, 251, 424 Cabeza de Vaca (film), 158–159 cabildos (Spanish political form), 24, 59–60, 387, 395 Cabot, John, 1, 344 Calancha, Antonio de la, 171–175 Callado, Antonio, 189, 190 Campanella, Tomasso 206 Campos, Augusto de, 189 Campos, Haroldo de, 11, 185, 193 Campuzano, Giuseppe, 426–430 cannibalism, 2, 12, 26, 408–411; see also antropofagia (cannibalism) Cárdenas Ayaipoma, Mario, 87 Carpentier, Alejo, 12, 18, 201

Carranza,Víctor, 95 Carrasco, Salvador, 156–157 Carrasquillo, Rosa Elena, 142, 143 Carrera, Magali, 77, 147 cartography and cartographers, 1–2, 273, 299, 328–329, 402; Abraham Ortelius map, 201, 202, 203; Americas-centric maps, 1; Baleato, Andrés, 335–337, 336; Cardiel, José, 352; Global South perspective maps, 1; Harley, J.B., on, 1; “Map of America” (Münster), 1–2; mapping, 114, 119; maps in relaciones geográficas, 399–400; Münster, Sebastian, 1–2; Plano de Cartagena de Yndyas (1790), 333; Wit, Frederik de, 347, 348 Carvalho, Bernardo, 190 Casey, Edward S., 24 casta society, 45–46, 73, 77–79 Castañeda, Pedro de, 14 Castañeda, Quetzil, 268–269 Castro, Américo, 10 Castro, Daniel, 413 Castro-Klarén, Sara, 6, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192 Catelli, Laura, 19, 26 Césaire, Aimé, 13, 18, 124–125, 252, 253 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 134, 415 Chang-Rodríguez, Raquel, 6 Charles, John, 379, 381 Charney, Paul J., 88 Chen, Chris, 44–45, 53–54 Chicanx canon, 13–14, 16, 17; Latin American studies, 17–20; literature, 14, 16, 25; Mexican American/Chicanx Studies, 13–17; see also Latinx studies Chichen Itza, 268, 269 Chimalpahin, Francisco de San Antón, 5, 10, 62 Christensen, Mark, 395 Cieza de León, Pedro, 372, 423–424 cinema: Cabeza de Vaca (1990), 158; Cautiverio feliz (1998), 158–159; cinematic gaze, 148–149; coloniality and, 147, 149–150, 154–156, 158; colonization of the imaginary, 156–158; de/colonizing the labor of film, 154–156; Disney, 152–153; Grupo Ukamau, 155; Hollywood, 151–155, 159; indianization of the conquistadors, 158–159; indianizing film, 150–152; La otra conquista (The Other Conquest) (1998), 156–158; national critique of cinematic colonialism, 152–154; New Latin American Cinema movement, 154; Nuevo Mundo (New World) (1978), 156–157; Para recibir el canto de los pájaros (1995), 154–156; Pirinop: Meu primeiro contato (2007), 156; También la lluvia (Even the Rain) (2010), 154–156, 158

434

Index Clarke, Kamari, 409 Clavijero, Francisco Javier, 23, 234 Clifford, James, 314, 421 Códice Borgia, 100, 101, 102 Códice Xolotl, 103, 104 Códice Zouche-Nuttall, 103, 103 Coe, Michael, 273 cofradías (con-fraternities), 24, 66 Cold War, 13, 120 coloniality, 18–21, 24–27; cinema and, 147, 149–150, 154–156, 158; gender/sexual identity and, 419–420; of power, 18, 67, 71–72, 118, 120–122, 149, 155, 283, 407, 420 colonial Latinx studies, 13–17 colonial object ontologies, 253–254, 262–263 Columbus, Christopher, 3, 4, 6, 9–10, 64, 125, 126; colonial object ontologies and, 262–263; Diario del primer viaje, 249, 255–263; ecocritical turn and, 132, 137–138; film and, 154, 155; materiality of first Atlantic crossing, 255–258; rescates and material culture of first contact, 258–262 Columpar, Corinn, 148 Combe, Isabelle, 184, 187, 195 comedias de Indias (plays on the Indies), 8 Connell, Raewyn, 281 Cook, James, 201, 210 Cope, R. Douglas, 43, 46–47 Copernicanism, 168–169, 178 Cornejo Polar, Antonio, 12–13, 74 Coronado, Raúl, 25 Coronil, Fernando, 17 corregidores (provincial magistrates), 59, 92, 401 Cortés, Hernán, 59, 60–61, 141, 154, 157, 200, 201, 234, 254, 299, 302, 320, 364, 375–376, 380, 408 Creole knowledge, 281–291; Balbuena, Bernardo de, and, 86, 283, 284–285; La Cruz, Juana Inés de, and, 283, 284, 286, 287, 291–292; Oviedo, Juan Antonio de, and, 285–286; Pérez de Ribas, Andrés, and, 286, 292; scholarship trends on religion, knowledge, and gender, 283–284; Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de, and, 283, 284, 287–290, 291 créolité, 19 criollismo, 6, 85–95; case of Lima, 87–91; definition of, 85–86; identity and, 92–95; nationhood and, 86–87; Peruvian independence and, 92–95 Crosby, Alfred, 132–133, 135 cultural turn, 22, 23 Cummins, Thomas B. F., 274, 314 Curiel, Ochy, 7 Curtin, Philip D., 329

de Certeau, Michel, 195, 272, 421–422 de la Cadena, Marisol, 75 de Oto, Alejandro, 79 Dean, Carolyn, 252, 271, 314 decolonial turn, 18–19, 20, 26; “coloniality” and, 117–127; “coloniality of power” and, 118, 120–122; Quijano, Aníbal, and, 117–122, 123–124, 126–127; Wynter, Sylvia, and, 117, 122–127 Deleuze, Gilles, 251, 322 del Monte, Domingo, 4, 233 DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, 134, 135, 262 del Valle, Ivonne, 50, 52, 53, 253, 407 Derrida, Jacques, 22, 295, 302 Descola, Philippe, 188, 190–192 Díaz, Mónica, 283 Díaz Balsera,Viviana, x, 6, 24 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 4–5, 60–61, 234, 301, 380; Historia verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España, 380 diluvialism, 165–178; Copernicanism and, 168–169, 178; Dulard, Paul Alexandre and, 169; Huet, Pierre Daniel, and, 168, 177; Peralta Barnuevo, Pedro de, and, 169; Regnault, Noël, and, 169; Woodward, John, and, 168–169 dispositif, 71–72, 79–80 Dominicans (religious order), 65–66, 158, 207, 218, 235, 237, 239–240, 249, 287, 365, 413–414, 423 Drake, Francis, 142–144 Drake Manuscript,The (Histoire Naturelle Des Indes), 133, 143 Du Bois, W.E.B., 47–48, 125 Duckert, Lowell Nelson, 135 Dueñas, Alcira, 379, 381 Dussel, Enrique D., 17, 72, 281–282 Eakin, Marshall, 8 earthquakes: Lima–Callao earthquake (1746), 92, 169; Peru earthquake (1687), 429 Echevarría, Nicolás, 158 Echeverría, Bolívar, 28n5 ecocritical turn, 132–144; deforestation and, 133, 141–142, 143–144; dogs and, 135–140; ecotones and, 141–142; fauna extinctions and, 138–140; García Márquez, Gabriel, and, 140; Melville, Elinor, and, 132, 133, 141, 144; Ozama River and, 140–143; Raleigh, Walter, and, 134–136; river landscapes and, 135, 140–144; sustainability and, 134, 141, 143, 144 El Dorado, 363–365, 367–368, 370, 371–374, 376 Elcano, Juan Sebastián, 1 Elizabeth I of England, 363–364, 367, 370, 371 encomienda system, 59, 235, 238, 349–352, 354, 394, 410–413

435

Index endangered peoples and communities, 141, 142 endangered species, 136 Enlightenment, 9, 10, 12, 23, 54, 165–178, 205, 328–340 Ercilla y Zúñiga, Alonso de, 5, 9 ethnohistory, 57–58, 60–61, 74–76, 272, 275, 365 eugenics, 74, 239 Eugenius IV, Pope, 218 evangelization, 24, 50, 65, 156, 158, 194, 206, 235, 237, 238, 281, 282, 285, 290–291, 383–385, 394, 412–413, 424 Ezpeleta, Josef de, 332–333 Fabian, Johannes, 22, 148, 270 Fanon, Frantz, 13, 148, 252, 253, 262–263; Black Skin,White Masks, 124; Wretched of the Earth, 124, 125 Fausto, Carlos, 186, 187 Feijoo y Montenegro, Benito Jerónimo, 167 Feliciano-Santos, Sherina, 5 Ferdinand II of Aragon, 249, 261, 411, 413 Ferman, Claudia, 156 Fernández de Enciso, Martín, 408 Fernández de Navarrete, Martín, 4, 236 Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo, 5, 133, 141, 234, 235; La historia general y natural de las Indias, 136, 137 Fernández Ortega, Racso, 140 Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 12, 13 Ferreira da Silva, Denise, 252 Figueiredo,Vera Follein de, 185 Figueroa, Sotero, 15 Figueroa,Yomaira, 17 Filer, Malva E., 6 Florentine Codex, 62–63, 299, 393, 397–403 Foucault, Michel, 8, 147, 282, 316, 323; Archaeology of Knowledge,The, 22; on “archive,” 295, 322; on dispositif, 71, 72, 77, 79; History of Sexuality Vol I., The, 71 Franciscans, 20, 209, 299, 311, 312, 315, 366, 394–395, 397, 414, 429 Franco, Jean, 6, 9, 152 Freyre, Gilberto, 193–195 Fuchs, Barbara, 24, 284, 285, 376, 377 Fuentes, Marisa, 22, 66, 68, 382 Funes Monzote, Reinaldo, 133 Galeano, Eduardo, 8; Open Veins of Latin America, The, 132–133 Gamio, Manuel, 74 García, Alan, 11 García Canclini, Nestor, 128, 185, 323 García, Francisco, 208–209 García, Gregorio de, 168, 173, 176 García Márquez, Gabriel, 140, 309 García, Miguel, 215–216, 218, 219–221, 237

García, Pablo, 289 García Peña, Lorgia, 25 García Sáiz, María Concepción, 77 Garcilaso de la Vega, el Inca, 5, 11, 62, 100, 104, 380, 424; Comentarios reales de los incas (Royal commentaries of the Incas), 73, 76, 86, 118, 255, 300 Garibay, Ángel María, 57, 62, 398 gender: cannibalism and, 192–195; queer tropes of, 420–423; scholarship trends on religion, knowledge, and gender, 283–284; sexual and gender identity, 419–430; third-gender performativity, the Andean feminine and primordial androgyny, 423–425; Travestis and the Chuquichinchay in visual and performance art, 425–430 Gerassi Navarro, Nina, 25 Gerbi, Antonello, 138–139, 165, 170, 178 Gerson, Juan, 314, 315 Gil y Zárate, Antonio, 9 Gilliam, Angela, 194 Gillin, John P., 75 Gilroy, Paul, 17, 241 Ginsburg, Faye, 150–151, 153 Girard, René, 183–184 Glave, Luis Miguel, 64, 88, 95 Glissant, Édouard, 13, 122, 125, 126, 240 Godin, Louis, 92 Goic, Cedomil, 6 Goldmark, Matthew, 7, 16 González Casanova, Pablo, 79 González de Barcia, Andrés, 4, 168, 173, 176 González Echevarría, Roberto, 12 González, Juan, 318; Moctezuma Offering Gold Presents to Hernán Cortés, 320 González, Juan, Harvest of Empire, 14 González, Martín, 350 González, Miguel, 318; Moctezuma Offering Gold Presents to Hernán Cortés, 320;Virgin of Guadalupe, 318–319, 319 González Rodríguez, Adolfo Luis, 407 Gónzalez-Ripoll, Armando, 233 Gosson, Renée, 134 Goveia, Elsa, 124 Greenblatt, Stephen, 3, 377n4, 380 Griffiths, Alison, 152 Grove, Richard, 132, 134, 135 Gruesz, Kirsten Silva, 14, 16, 25 Gruzinski, Serge, 73, 147, 156–157, 204–205, 365 Guaman Poma de Ayala, Felipe, 5, 19, 62, 63, 122, 300, 303; Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (New Chronicle of Good Government), 57, 73, 87–88, 119–120, 424 Guattari, Félix, 251, 322

436

Index Gudynas, Eduardo, 3 Guha, Ranajit, 23 Habermas, Jürgen, 147 Hagen, Oskar, 315 Hall, Stuart, 17, 18 Handley, George, 134 Harley, J. B., 1 Hanke, Lewis, 8, 235, 407, 408 Haraway, Donna, 251, 258 Harley, J.B., 1 Harris, Roy, 110 Harrison, Regina, 63, 430 Heidegger, Martin, 251, 268, 274 Heise, Ursula, 134, 136 hemispheric turn, 12, 24–25 Henríquez Ureña, Pedro, 6 Hernández, Francisco, 399 Hernández Sánchez-Barba, Mario, 333, 340 Herzog, Tamar, 407 Higgins, Antony, 22 Himpele, Jeffrey D., 268–269 Hispanism, 8–10, 22, 238–241 Holt, Thomas, 44 Hooker, Juliet, 25 Horswell, Michael, 23 Huarochirí Manuscript, 5, 62 Hulme, Peter, 99, 134, 183–184 Huntington, Archer M., 9 Iberian empires, 43; Black Legend and, 22, 45, 363–364, 365, 369–371, 414; racialization and, 45–54 Iberian globalization: Abraham Ortelius map, 201, 202, 203; Alta California and, 209–211; Balboa,Vasco Núñez de, and, 199–200; deterritorialization and reterritorialization of regional economies, 204–205; frontierization and, 209–211; Magellan, Ferdinand, and, 200–201, 208; Malaspina Expedition, 209, 211; mare clausum doctrine, 203; missions and missionaries, 206–211; Modo de pelear de los Indios de California, 209; Oro (film) and, 199, 200; Terra Australis (great southern continent) and, 200–203; territorialization of the sea, 199–203, 205 indigenous intellectuals, 62–65 indigenous mounds and monuments, 253, 268–270, 300 indigenous self-governance, 59–67, 414 inter- and transdisciplinary engagements of colonial studies, 20–25 interdisciplinary turn, 2, 20–22, 25 Irving, Washington, 9

Irwin, Robert McKee, 3, 21 Isabella I of Castile, 249, 261, 394 Islamophobia, 53 Jackson, Shona, 5 James, C. L. R., 124 Jáuregui, Carlos A., 17, 72, 183–186, 189, 192–193, 195, 238, 289, 291 Juana Inés de la Cruz, 5, 154, 283, 284, 286, 287, 291–292, 303, 333 Jay, Martin, 147 Jesuits, 183–184, 239, 282, 285, 292; Acosta, José de, 44, 49–52, 172, 173, 382, 383; Claver, Pedro, 65, 383–386; García, Miguel, 215–216, 218, 219–221, 237; Kircher, Atanasius, 273; La conquista espiritual del Japón, 206; Leite, Gonçalo, 215–216, 218–221; missions and missionaries, 206, 208, 211; Montoya, Antonio Ruiz de, 193; Oviedo, Juan Antonio de, 285–286; Pérez de Ribas, Andrés, 286, 292; race and, 215–227; reductions and, 351–357; Regnault, Noël, 169; Sandoval, Alonso de, 220, 237, 382–385; translation and, 380–386, 388;Valera, Blás, 424;Vieira, Antonio, 221–227 Jim Crow, 47 Jordan, Winthrop, 217 Juan, Jorge, 89–92, 168 Kagan, Richard, 8 Kanellos, Nicolás, 15, 16 Katzew, Ilona, 77–78, 147 Kelemen, Pál, 310–311 Klein, Cecilia F., 323 Klor de Alva, Jorge, 17, 283 Knight, Franklin W., 330 Konetzke, Richard, 75 Kubayanda, Josaphat, 7 Kubler, George, 75, 310–314 La Condamine expedition, 89, 92 Lamming, George, 18, 125 La Plata, 344–357; Ayolas, Juan de, and, 346, 356; depopulation in, 346, 349; encomienda and reduction, 350–353; Guaraní and, 347–357; “Hunger in Buenos Aires”, 346; Irala, Domingo Martínez de, and, 346–350, 356; Mendoza, Pedro de, 344–346, 349, 350, 356; mobility and relocation, 346–350, 353–356; mud and hunger as tropes in, 344–345; Núnez Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar, 349–350, 356; Treaty of Madrid (1750) and Guaraní wars, 353–356 Larsen, Neil, 185

437

Index Las Casas, Bartolomé de: Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, 15, 22, 234; De unico vocationis modo, 366, 413; Historia de las Indias, 234–238, 240, 411, 413–414, 415; Memorial de Remedios para las Indias, 235, 237–238, 411, 413; Native Americans hanged over a fire, 368; Nuevo Mundo (Retes) and, 157; Saco, José Antonio, and, 231, 234, 235–239; Sepúlveda and 218; sovereignty and encomienda system, 173, 206, 231; The torture of King Bogota, 369 Latin American Boom, 12, 309 latinidad, 13, 16 latinoamericanismo vernáculo, 13 Latinx/Chicanx colonial archive, 14, 22; see also archives Latinx studies, 13–17, 28n7 Latour, Bruno, 191 Laverty, Paul, 155 Lazo, Raimundo, 3, 6 Leal, Luis, 14 Lefebvre, Herni, 328, 340, 345, 349 Leibsohn, Dana, 252, 314 Leite, Gonçalo, 215–216, 218–221 Lentz, David, 272 León Portilla, Miguel, 19, 62, 75, 398 León Pinelo, Antonio de, 166, 168, 169, 170–172, 175 Lepe-Carrión, Patricio, 74 Levin, David Michael, 147 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 183, 184 Lezama Lima, José, 28 Lima, Lázaro, 25 liminality, 137, 256, 424–425 limpieza de sangre, 43, 53, 175 Liss, Peggy K., 330 literacy, 10, 62, 67, 273, 395; orality-literacy binary, 99, 105–109, 110, 114, 115 Llano Zapata, José Eusebio, 165–178; diluvialism and, 165–178; Memorias histórico, físicas, crítico, apologéticas de la América Meridional, 165, 167–170, 172, 175–178; theory of Amerindian origins, 177–178 Lockhart, James, 57–60, 381, 396–397 Lohmann Villena, Guillermo, 88, 96n9 López Baralt, Mercedes, 6 López de Legazpi, Miguel, 204, 207 López de Velasco, Juan, 254, 399–400, 401–402 López, Kathleen, 7, 19 López Méndez, Luis, 8 Lugones, María, 7, 122, 159n1, 283, 291, 420 Machu Picchu, 11, 268–269 Magellan, Ferdinand, 1, 200–201, 208 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, 17, 19 Malintzin (also La Malinche or Doña Marina), 60–61, 380

Malpass, Michael A., 271–272 Mancall, Peter, 262 maps see cartography and cartographers Mariátegui, José Carlos, 11, 118–119, 121, 123, 276 Martell, Helvetia, 15 Martí, José, 9, 15, 240 Martínez, Josebe, 25 Martínez, María Elena, 63, 73, 410 Martínez-San Miguel,Yolanda, 5, 16, 18, 19, 20, 28, 76, 283, 285 Martínez Shaw, Carlos, 204 Marxism, 118, 120, 121, 253 Marx, Karl, 188, 251 masculinity, 148, 192–194, 281, 284, 285–290, 422, 424–425 materialities: colonial object ontologies, 262–263; Columbus’s Diario del primer viaje and, 249–263; of Columbus’s first Atlantic crossing, 255–258; culture studies, 250–251, 255, 262; enconchados (case study), 316–322; history of art and, 309–310; “hybrid” and, 311, 313, 314, 316, 317, 322; indigenous material cultures, 267–268; indigenous materialities and Western knowledge, 267–277; of indigenous past and present in Uruguay, 275–277; material culture, materiality, and colonial Latin American studies, 249–255; material turn, 316–322; Mesoamerican codices, 273–274; “mestizo” and, 311–313, 316; monumentality, architecture, and the organization and exploitation of the land, 268–272; Nanban objects, 317–319, 321; non-monumental indigenous objects, 272–274; Posa Chapel, Franciscan convent, 312; raced discourses and, 311–316; rescates and material culture of first contact, 258–262; styles and nomenclature in colonial art and architecture, 310–316; technical art history, 316–317; “tequitqui” and, 311, 312, 313; see also archives Mauss, Marcel, 260 Mayans y Siscar, Gregorio de, 170–171 Mazzotti, José Antonio, 76 McClintock, Anne, 148 McKinley, Michelle, 66 McLuhan, Marshall, 109 Medovoi, Leerom, 53 Meillassoux, Quentin, 252 Mello e Souza, Laura de, 227 Melville, Elinor, 132, 133, 141, 144 Menéndez Pidal, Ramón, 10 Menéndez y Pelayo, Marcelino, 9 Merediz, Eyda, 25, 413

438

Index mestizaje (miscegenation): as dispositif, 71–72, 79–80; field of Latin American colonial studies and, 71–80; history of race and, 48–49 mestizaje de sangre, 72 Metcalf, Alida, 61 Meyer, Stephen M., 134 Mier, Servando Teresa de, 8, 15, 234 Mignolo, Walter, 6, 17, 19, 22, 23, 99, 105, 108, 120, 121, 126, 150, 185–186, 189, 273, 282, 316, 399, 415 Miller, John, 134 Miller, Shawn William, 132–133 Miller, Toby, 140 Mintz, Sidney, 139 Miranda, Deborah, 422 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 147 Mitchell, W.J.T., 255 mobility, 8, 22–23, 27, 46, 76, 227, 270, 339, 353–356, 357, 395 Molina, Fernanda, 423, 428 Montaigne, Michel de, 183, 187 Monteiro, John, 61 Montesinos, Antonio de, 155, 237, 365 Montesinos, Fernando de, 172, 175 Morales Bermúdez, Francisco, 94 Moraña, Mabel, 17, 72 More, Anna, 22, 282, 284, 289 Moreno Villa, José, 311, 313 Mörner, Magnus, 75 Moseley, Michael E., 271 Moses, Bernard, 6, 9, 11 Mulvey, Laura, 148 Mundy, Barbara, 24, 252, 314, 401 Muñoz, Juan Bautista, 4, 22, 234 Münster, Sebastian, 1–2 Murra, John, 58 Myers, Kathleen, 283 Napoleon Bonaparte, 211 Napoleon III, 8 Nebrija, Antonio de, 393–394 Nefando, Javi, 429–430 négritude, 13, 125, 252 Nemser, Daniel, 234, 253, 407, 410 neobaroque, 11, 426 Nesvig, Martin, 283–284 Neumeyer, Alfred, 311, 314 New Historicism, 21, 365 New Spain, colonial static and “authorship” in: bilingual/bicultural intermediaries, 394–395; double mistaken identity, colonial static, and untranslatability, 395–397; Florentine Codex, 62, 63, 299, 393, 397–401, 402; pluricultural and plurilingual New Spain, 393–394; relaciones geográficas (geographical relations), 393, 399–402, 420; translation and, 393–402

New World Group, 124–125 Newton, Melanie, 22 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 185, 188 Nirenberg, David, 45 Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar, 5, 14, 154, 349–350, 356; Cabeza de Vaca (film), 158–159; Naufragios, 158, 256 Núñez de Balboa,Vasco, 199–200 oceanic turn, 25 Oliveira, Emanuelle, 193 O’Malley, John, 220 Omi, Michael, 43, 52–53 Onís, Federico de, 10 orality-literacy binary, 99, 105–109, 110, 114, 115 Oro (film), 199, 200 Ortelius, Abraham, 175, 201, 202, 203 Ortiz, Fernando, 12–13, 231, 232–233, 235, 238–239, 241, 253 Oviedo, Juan Antonio de, 285–286 pachacuti (Turner of the Earth), 365, 371–376 Padrón, Ricardo, 24 Pagden, Anthony, 50, 407 palenques (groups of runaway slaves; maroon communities), 24, 67, 285, 386–388 Pané, Ramón, 137–138 Paquette, Gabriel B., 330 Paravisini-Gebert, Lizabeth, 5, 24, 26 Pastor, Beatriz, 158, 258 Paul II, Pope, 415 Paul III, Pope, 411 Paz, Octavio, 9, 380 Pease, Franklin, 62 Peguero, Luis Joseph, 137, 138 Pérez de Ribas, Andrés, 286, 292 Pérez, Emma, 18 Pérez Sánchez, Alfonso, 313 periodization of race, 44, 45–46 Perlongher, Néstor, 11 perspectivism, 190–192 Philip II of Spain, 175, 204, 206–207 Picón Salas, Mariano, 6 Piedra, José, 259–260 pintura de castas (the presumed whiteness), 19, 147 Piquer, Andrés, 167, 168–169 Pirotto, Armando D., 6 Pizzaro, Francisco, 141 plantation farming and culture, 215, 219, 224, 226, 232, 233, 236, 240–241, 298, 304, 339, 387; decolonial turn and, 124; ecocritical turn and, 133, 134, 141, 144; mate plantations, 352, 354 Poblete, Juan, 3, 13, 21, 26 Polo, Marco, 2; Travels, 257 Poole, Deborah, 147, 148–149, 150 Poole, Stafford, 283

439

Index Popol Vuh, 5, 299, 300 port cities, 328–340; Buenos Aires, 328, 329, 330, 332, 337–338, 339; Callao, 328, 329, 332, 335, 339; Cartagena de Indias, 328, 329, 332, 333, 337, 339; chaos, disorder, and freedom in, 330–337; Guayaquil, 328, 330, 332, 334, 337; Montevideo, 328, 329–330, 332, 337, 339; racialization of space in, 337–340; slavery and, 330, 337–340; southernmost ports, 337–340; spatial nature of ports, 329–330 Powers, Karen Vieira, 63 Prado, Paulo, 194 Prescott, William H., 9, 250 Price, Rachel, 253 Pupo Walker, Enrique, 12, 21 Puri, Shalini, 17 Quijano, Aníbal, 18, 71, 117–122, 123–124, 126–127, 149, 282, 283, 407 Quiroga, José, 7, 208 Rabasa, José, 256, 411 race: defining race, 44; identity and, 45; limpieza de sangre and, 43, 53, 175; as material, 44–45; “modern” conceptions of, 43, 45–46, 52–53; periodization of race, 44, 45–46; racializing practices, 44–45; as social construction, 44, 48, 49; the work of race, 44; see also mestizaje (miscegenation); racialization; slavery racial domination, 46–48, 52 racialization, 49–52; Acosta, José de and, 44, 49–52; colonial hierarchy and, 411; decolonial aesthetics and, 426; Iberian empires and, 45–54; of the “Indian”, 44–46; of knowledge production, 282; of language, 314; material culture and, 252, 253, 262; “mestizaje” and, 49, 72; of the Muslim, 53; of slavery, 218; of space, 142, 337–340; of violence, 48 Rafael,Vicente L., 18 Raleigh, Walter: Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtifvl Empyre of Gviana,The, 363–365, 369–372, 376; El Dorado and, 363–365, 370, 371–374, 376; Historie of the World, 134–136; pachacuti and, 371–377; “White Legend” and, 364, 365, 371, 376 Rama, Ángel, 12, 62–63, 79, 200, 305n7 Rana, Junaid, 53 Rappaport, Joanne, 72 real maravilloso, 11, 12

Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage project, 16 reducción (resettlement), 59, 87, 208, 350–357 relaciones geográficas (geographical relations), 5, 24, 254, 274, 299, 393, 399–402, 420 Restall, Matthew, 210 Retes, Gabriel, 156–157 Reyes, Constantino Valerio, 312 Ribeiro, Darcy, 190 Ricard, Robert, 206 Rincón, Carlos, 185 Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia, 72, 75, 78–79, 154 Rocha, João Cezar Castro, 184–185 Rodó, José Enrique, 9 Rodrigues, Nina, 74 Rodríguez, Ileana, 23, 25 Rodríguez Ramos, Reniel, 250 Rony, Fatimah Tobing, 148 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 152 Rosenblat, Ángel, 75 Ross, Kathleen, 282, 284 Rostworowski, María, 58, 64 Rueda Pimiento, Óscar, 139 Ruiz de Montoya, Antonio, 193, 357 Russo, Alessandra, 259, 262, 321–322 Sacabuche, Andrés, 384–385, 386–387, 388 Saco, José Antonio, 4, 15, 231–241, 410; biographical details, 231–233; Cuban Literary Academy and, 233–234; Las Casas, Bartolomé de, and, 231, 234, 235–239 Sahagún, Bernardino de, 5, 63, 234, 299, 381, 397–399, 403 Said, Edward, 17, 269 Saldaña, María Josefina, 25 Salomon, Frank, 112–113, 381, 382 Salvatore, Ricardo, 10 Sampedro, Benita, 24 Sánchez, Cristián, 158–159 Sandoval, Alonso de, 220, 237, 382–385 Sanjinés, Jorge, 154–156 Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui, Juan de, 424–425, 429 Santos, Milton, 357 Sarduy, Severo, 11 Scarpaci, Joseph L., 328 Schiwy, Freya, 151–152 Schomburg, Arturo, 4, 15–16 Schroeder, Susan, 283 Schwartz, Jorge, 185 Schwartz, Roberto, 192 Schwartz, Stuart, 194, 226–227 Seed, Patricia, 17, 23, 407 Segato, Rita, 118 self-governance, 59–67, 414 self-representation, 57–68

440

Index semiotics, 99–115; aesthesis and rationality in indigenous American sign systems, 111–114; Andean quipu, 104–105; Códice Borgia, 101, 102; Códice Xolotl, 103, 104; Códice Zouche-Nuttall, 103, 103; Inca quipu, 104–105, 105; media-studies approach to orality-literacy binary, 105–109; Mesoamerican iconography, 100–104; rational and aesthetic modes of communication, 109–111; Tomatlan bill of sale, 112, 113 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 218, 407, 408–409 Serra, Rafael, 15 sexual and gender identity, 419–430 Sheridan, Ana Cecilia, 210 Shohat, Ella, 148, 150, 152 sign systems see semiotics Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de, 5, 74, 89, 133, 255, 300, 303; Creole knowledge and, 283, 284, 287–290, 291–292; Los infortunios de Alonso Ramírez, 133; Theatro de virtudes políticas, 89 Simon, Joshua, 15 slavery: Anglo-Spanish Treaty (1817), 14–15; Jesuits and, 215–227; palenques (groups of runaway slaves; maroon communities), 24, 67, 285, 386–388; port cities and, 330, 337–340 Solodkow, David, 238, 410 Solórzano y Pereira, Juan, 74 Sommer, Doris, 76, 194 Sousa Santos, Boaventura de, 397 Spalding, Karen, 58 Spanish Golden Age, 8, 12, 123, 126, 153 spatial knowledge, 328–340; see also port cities spatial turn, 23–24 Spence, Louise, 152 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 17, 192, 316, 409 Staden, Hans, 154, 195 Stahl, Peter W., 139 Stam, Robert, 147, 148, 150, 152 Stavenhagen, Rodolfo, 28n9, 80n5, 124 Stavig, Ward, 407 Stolcke,Verena, 76 Stoler, Laura Ann, 22, 72, 194, 296 Suárez de Peralta, Juan, 237 Suárez, Margarita, 88 Subirats, Eduardo, 185 Sweet, James, 62, 217, 227 Szurmuk, Mónica, 3, 21 Taylor, Diana, 22 territorialization of the sea, 199–203, 205 Theodoro, Janice, 28n5 Thompson, Eric, 273 Thompson, Lanny, 25 Ticknor, George, 9 Todorov, Tzvetan, 380 Torquemada, Juan de, 173–176, 178

Torres-Saillant, Silvio, 18 Tortorici, Zeb, 422–423, 428–429 Toussaint, Manuel, 309–311, 313 Townsend, Camilla, 380 transatlantic turn, 24–25 transculturation, 12, 19, 21, 25, 48, 58, 185, 189, 200, 210, 239, 241, 314, 419, 420, 422, 425, 426 transdisciplinary turn, 20–22, 25 translation, 379–388; agency and, 379, 382, 388; black linguistic intermediaries in colonial Spanish America, 382–388; colonial evangelical projects, 381–382; Florentine Codex and, 393, 397–401, 402; historical narratives, 380–381; Jesuits and, 380–386, 388; legal settings and documents, 381; Malintzin (also La Malinche or Doña Marina) and, 380; military campaigns, 380; natural world and technologies for manipulating it, 381; in New Spain, 393–402; relaciones geográficas (geographical relations) and, 254, 274, 299, 393, 399–402, 420 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 14 Treaty of Madrid (1750), 353–356, 357 Treaty of Tordesillas, 1 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 22 Túpac Amaru, 373–374 Túpac Amaru II, 92 Ugarte, Manuel, 9 Ulloa, Antonio, 92, 166, 176, 178 Úrsula de Jesús, 65 Varela, Consuelo, 262 Varela, Félix, 232 Vasconcelos, José, 74, 75 Veracini, Lorenzo, 71–72, 80, 276 Vera Tudela, Elisa Sampson, 283 Verdesio, Gustavo, 23, 253, 345 Vidal, Hernán, 13, 17 Vieira, Antonio, 221–227 Vilches, Elvira, 253, 260, 407 Villena Fiengo, Sergio, 119 vitalism, 167–168, 188, 256 Vitoria, Francisco de, 407, 408–409, 412, 413 Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, 186, 187–188, 189, 191–192 Voigt, Lisa, 24 Wachtel, Nathan, 19, 75 Wagner, Roy, 190, 191 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 120, 149 Walsh, Catherine, 415, 420, 426 Warburg, Aby 321 Wethey, Harold E., 310, 311, 313

441

Index Whitehead, Neil, 184, 186–187, 195, 365 Williams, Patrick, 18 Winant, Howard, 43, 52–53 Winsor, Justin, 9 Wittgenstein, Ludwig von, 186 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 315–316 Wynter, Sylvia, 13, 18, 19, 117, 122–127, 252, 281

Yale Peruvian Expedition (1911), 11, 268 Yannakakis,Yanna, 61, 381, 395 Yoffee, Norman, 270 Young, Robert, 194 Zamora, Margarita, 76, 94 Zermeño-Padilla, Guillermo, 75

442