The problem, of course, addressed somewhat across these articles, is that the past- and the present- is terribly messy. There are not, in the end, the sorts of clear good guys and bad guys we would like to uncover and deploy. Nor does the past fit neatly into our present day conceptions; only through a conscious or unconscious process of effacement and selective addition can any side in a given conflict or construction of memory arrive at the desired ends. Some things must be forgotten; some things must be deliberately remembered in order to arrive at forgetting. Even more problematically, few struggles over memory exist in a strict binary which could lend itself to clear good guys and bad guys across time. In the case of New Mexico, Hispanics can lay claim to their own narrative of oppression and violence directed against them, whether via stories of the massacres of Po’pay’s revolt, or of later Anglo-American conquest and domination. They can simultaneously employ narratives of victory and of subjugation, while also being subjected to the charge of being oppressive and racist themselves.

I am reminded in all of this of my own conflicted experience and identity as a white Southern American (with indigenous ancestry as well, though its history of deployment in my own family and across the South is ambiguous and conflicted): articulations of Southern identity and memory seem to largely oscillate between being the ‘bad Americans’ whose past (and present) is a fitting target for opprobrium and disgust by non-Southerners. As white yet highly rural and still heavily religious the white South provides, and has long provided, a convenient location to express emotions and sentiments that would be dangerous to deploy against non-white minorities. Yet the all too typical white Southerner’s reaction to this effective demonization and marginalization is to go in the opposite direction, and to seek to efface and forget the very real ‘sins of our fathers’; the present our past as only one of heroics and proudly produced and defended traditional culture, without allowing for any of the messiness and moral ambiguity and outright abuses and evils that also make up our past (and the past of everyone else on the planet). Navigating between these two extremes is not restricted to us, or to the heirs of the Spanish conquest. It is- if I may indulge in a universal statement- an experience that spans the globe, even if it is not always felt with the same acuteness. Finding ways of remembering and even constructing the past- our pasts, real and imagined- has long been a human endeavor, and we still have a great ways to go before we come to any sort of truly constructive and humane conclusion.

This common approach stems from a shared Western Christian intellectual culture and common discourse, built in great part through the reading, exegesis, and localized employment of the Bible. Esguerra brings up numerous examples of direct exegesis of the Bible in behalf of colonizing endeavors; even more frequent are more subtle background traces of a shared Christian discourse established through centuries of Western European contact and engagement with Christianity and especially Christianity’s sacred text. Whether through the lens of crusading or further refracted through such values as chivalry, certain ideas about and ways of seeing the world came to be established, in both Iberia and England, through a long history of this engagement with Christianity and the Bible. As a result, both societies employed their common heritage, reflected through their particular post-Reformation trajectories, in justifying and speaking about and understanding their conquest and control of the Americas.

In establishing all of this Esguerra is quite convincing. It goes a long ways towards supporting his contention in the final chapter that the Americas should be viewed as a whole- he implies as uniformly Western, not as a dichotomy of West versus the Rest, with the Rest including Latin America (how a region with that most Western of appellatives, Latin, could be other than Western, I have never understood…). Some of his attempts to point out parallels in discourses fall a little flat, usually because of the superabundance of convincing evidence on one side alongside a marked lack on the other. Sometimes I suspect that what he implies to be influence is better interpreted as a working out of similar deposits, a common trajectory, without a great deal of later interpenetration. Sacred texts in particular have a great deal of textual power; there are exegetical moves and interpretations that are common, more or less, in medieval Christian communities from Central Asia to the western coast of Ireland, with no actual influence between them, just a shared sacred text and some shared methods of interpretation.

On a related note, sometimes the focus on the demonic felt a little forced, conditioning the material- perhaps a broader focus would have been helpful. Certainly the material covered is broad: from depictions of the New World as a demonically diseased garden in need of weeding and renewal, to the existence of signs of God in the very vegetation of the Americas: the range of discourses Esguerra covers is truly broad, which, if nothing else, keeps this book continually interesting. And Esguerra is generous with illustrations, but not simply as breaks in the text- he actually does a good job integrating them into the argument of the text, reminding us of the visceral quality of even highly intellectual arguments, as the intellectual discourses met and materialized in the Americas, whether under Iberian or Puritan control.

Patricia Seed looks at such points of convergence and difference in her book Ceremonies of Possession in European Conquest of the New World 1491-1640. An enjoyable read for its relative brevity and diversity of topics, some of her points hold up very well. The ways in which various European polities take possession- or rather, declare and legitimize their possession, primarily to themselves- appear as diverse as the various polities and their cultural histories. For each nation, Seed describes the particular ways of marking possession on a new (to Europeans of course) territory, and then details the historical/cultural background of those ways of marking possession. For instance, the English, she argues, employed little in the way of ceremony or official documentation to establish their dominion. Instead, the English built things: houses, fences, walls, demarcating their space and establishing their ownership. Not only did they expect these actions to register with each other as Englishmen, but they also expected them to send the same signals to other Europeans. That they did not was part, Seed argues, of the mutual- perhaps sometimes deliberate, but usually not- incomprehension over manners of establishing possession.

There are some issues that came to my mind while reading this study, and they are reflective of the perils of comparative history I suppose. Why exactly did the English completely forgo ceremony? Was it a result of the Protestant Reformation? Could they not have combined both the active imposition of possession with the more ceremonially enacted rites similar to other nations? As for the Spanish, while the requiriemento is certainly an important part of things, the establishment of official political entities is doubtless moreso, and Seed seems unaware or uninterested in them. Also, I would have preferred a more fleshed-out proof of the influence of Islamic ideas of conquest and legality upon Spanish forms- while the intellectual milieu argument has some merits, I am always suspicious of it. Ideas do not simply float on ether back and forth- one needs solid locations, texts, instances of interpenetration. That said, her description of Islamic thought and practice was quite decent, I thought, for a non-specialist in the field. Finally, the importance of Papal authority could have used much greater emphasis; granted, it shows up in the conclusion as part of the common European imitation of Rome, but should have been incorporated in the body of the Spanish material. And as for overall questions, I would want to know a little more about how the conditions in the New World affected European approaches. Did the English act differently in, say, Honduras or the Caribbean than in North America? Obviously the Spanish greatly modify the requiriemento- do other nationalities do likewise? And perhaps greater attention could have been given to exactly why these ceremonies were enacted: obviously they are acts of self-legitimization, but more on how did they do this, and how the results could be transmitted back home would be helpful. In some cases it is quite obvious: the Portuguese and Dutch produced knowledge regimes that could translate to people back home as easily as those employing them in the New World or in organs of power.  And while it was not the point of the book, considering- where possible- indigenous responses would be very helpful and interesting.

There are doubtless other issues one could raise- those above are some that came to my mind because they involve things I know a little about. Also, while obviously outside the scope of the book, a continuation of this investigation into later forms of colonialism would be interesting: how much do these ceremonies change and evolve to suit new imperial conditions? Seeds obliquely mentions, for instance, the British in India, where very different conditions prevailed than in North America. How did the British adapt? And so on.

In lieu of such an examination, we do have Eddie Izzard’s take on later colonial ceremonies of possession- he in fact brings out the hilarity of a seemingly logical (to its enactors) way of taking possession with the incredulity of those being possessed; plus, the importance of violence as a completing and truly affirming agent is in evidence here:

Alas, whatever promise the indigenous people hold- reconstructed voices, recovered narratives, yadda, yadda- Gutierrez either loses interest in or realizes that his tenuous evidence base can no longer be forced to support his constructions. As a result, most of the book ends up being a hybrid (ha ha) narrative/analysis of the history of Spanish conquest and colonisation of New Mexico. This is not, I think, necessarily a bad thing- some of the sections describing the history of Spanish activity were useful enough, at least in terms of giving an idea of what was going on in the Spanish world. However, the stated premises of the book- focus on the indigenous (hence the ‘Corn Mothers’), and marriage and sexual practice- strangely disappear for the bulk of the study. And when Gutierrez does examine his stated themes, he either suffers from a poor evidence base, as with the indigenous, or slips into tenacious moralizing, as with his descriptions of the Franciscans. Despite his valorous intentions of giving voice to the Pueblo people, depending upon far-flung anthropological studies and time-collapsed, mostly external, even deeply hostile, sources is probably not the best way to go about, one would think. Certain contradictions become evident: the indigenous swing between sexually promiscuous, the pueblos veritable havens of free love- yet with the intrusion of Spaniards into the narrative, it becomes clear that the indigenous women are not quite so free with their bodies as they initially appear. Granted, Gutierrez attempts a resolution, but the problem remains that all of his evidence for these attitudes flows from either contemporary Spanish accounts, or from modern-day anthropological/ethnographic studies. In describing the indigenous, chronology clearly does not matter: as with so many other writers, we are implicitly given to understand that non-European socities are refuges of the unchanging, their myths and rituals subsisting mystically outside the streams of time. Whether this is rooted in some metaphysical speculation or the simple utility of having a larger source base through ignoring dates is immaterial.

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

I began this pair of readings with some trepidation. Sex(uality) and gender are popular, buzz-worthy terms, which means that they are often thrown into scholarship as necessary elements, with the obligatory nods to Foucault or Butler and the like. A few buzzwords- gender, body, performance, blah blah- and the author moves on to the topics she actually cares about and knows. These books, while possessing their own problems, are not perfunctory examinations of gender and sexual practice, but rather make these categories central, even totalizing, to their analysis. That said, the two books differ pretty dramatically in their basic approaches and their usefulness and historical accuracy. I will begin with Trexler’s book, the more seriously problematic of the two it seemed to me (and I apologize if I sound particularly critical- probably I should include more positive analysis but sometimes criticism is easier and cathartic…).

Trexler takes the wide view, constructing a bold world of reified and essentialist ‘Americans,’ ‘Europeans,’ even ‘Asians’ and ‘Africans,’ as well as- of course!- ‘Muslims,’ the sufferers par exemplar of  ‘harem [sic] culture’. Having already discovered, via his reading of Foucault and Freud, what he is looking for, he proceeds to find it beginning with the ancient Persians (via Herodotus[!]) and ending with nineteenth century American anthropologists. In between cultures, religions, polities, and the like collapse before his all-consuming vision of things. Buggery=(more or less) state formation. This of course is an expression of power (someone read his Foucault!), which is pretty much the same everywhere. This totalizing discourse is supported by a highly impressionistic use of sources, both when setting the ‘European’ and Iberian/Islamic background- the two areas with which I am most familiar. His construction of Islamic sexuality and gender understanding was especially painful; I was reminded that Said’s critiques in Orientalism, while sometimes over the top and flawed, can also be all too pertinent. Amazingly, Trexler quite confidently fixes ‘Islamic’ (read: Arabo-Islamic/Perso-Islamic) understandings and practices of gender and sexuality via a handful of studies from Morocco, and one from Medina. That, and a dubious source on Jewish sexuality, is the greater part of his sweeping discourse of Islamic mores, which in turn back up his contentions for Iberian culture.

Arriving in the Americas, my knowledge of the sources is of course much less, but even a cursory examination reveals the far-flung impressionistic approach Trexler takes. This in itself would not necessarily be a problem. One cannot fault a scholar for the paucity of his sources if they are simply unavailable. One can however fault him for building castles in the air and declaring them to be the absolute case; one can fault him for an inability or unwillingness to acknowledge what is surely a more complex situation than a universal mode of being a berdache that Trexler seems to uncover. Further, even within the problems of his use of sources, the reduction of sexuality and human activity that Trexler proposes is seriously problematic on its own, to say the least. That said, it seems likely that much of his discourse is accurate enough- certainly sexuality and gender were and are powerful means of communicating, conveying, and imposing power relationships. However, that is not the sum of it, and the ways in which gender and sexuality are expressed, the extent to which they are used, and so on, varies from society to society, a fact that ought to be kept in constant mind, especially in the presence of apparent external homogeneity.

Where Trexler jumped from Persia to Cuzco with apparent ease, Sigal has the immense (in light of Trexler at least) virtue of largely confining his examination to post-conquest, colonial Mayan society. He further confines- largely- himself to a select grouping of texts, which he presents as simultaneously representative of pre-conquest/colonial Mayan culture as well as colonial ‘hybridity’ (Sigal’s favorite, constantly recurring concept). Sometimes it is very unclear where on this spectrum a given text or interpretation falls- perhaps a deliberate strategy on Sigal’s part. While he does in fact take into account ‘external’ history (despite his prerequisite disavowal of ‘positivism’ and his deliberate adherence to the world of the texts), much of his interpretation does stay within the confines of his texts, which leads to both positive- a grounded, particular path that avoids the pitfalls of sweeping generalities and floating cultural signifiers and interpretations- and the less positive. Sometimes the way in which Sigal is extracting a given meaning from a text is very unclear; in a few chapters I found myself completely lost while trying to follow Sigal’s often torturous logic and prose style. The blame cannot all be upon Sigal, I ought to note- no source is ‘transparent,’ and Sigal’s certainly are not. This makes appraising his interpretations and claims to extract gender and sexual practice all the more difficult.

It would take more time and space than I wish to spend to examine each of Sigal’s arguments and constructions of Mayan identity and response to colonialism. Some sections I found quite convincing and useful; others were much more dubious, or far too hedged upon expansive treatments of Lacan or Freud and too little Mayan or Spanish material, the evidentiary material receding into the background, floating in the air like the floating phallus Sigal spends a great deal of time elucidating. Most troubling, I sometimes thought that Sigal believes that he has ‘decoded’ Mayan society in its whole via his elucidation of gender and sex; that everything can be collapsed into this one ‘thing,’ hinged upon sexual practice. Hence, by ‘desire’ only sexual (in an apparently very specific though never actually specified sense) desire is meant- but surely we can allow for the existence of other permutations and means of desire without collapsing them all into (presumably physically, actively) sexual desire? Likewise with other issues, whether reactions to colonial situations or understandings of the ‘sexuality’ of the gods. Certainly, sexuality and gender are central issues in any culture, and certainly sex and gender become ‘tools’ of the sorts of construction and moves of power that Trexler and Sigal have in mind; but I would suggest that things- especially things outside of the modern European context- are in fact rather more complex than that. But that’s a whole other post/book/career…

Disclaimer: reading this book was a little tiresome after having read through the conquest of Mexico and its attendant events and personages several times already, enough to have the sequence of events, the important people, the sources, pretty well memorized. Given that Townsend’s book unfolds in a rather novelistic manner, my previous familiarity probably detracted from the book’s effect. I imagine that had I read it without much prior knowledge, it would have been more effective. As it was, there was little that I was not already aware of or sources I had not either already read or knew about. This is not necessarily a fault of the author- the extant traces of Malintzin’s life are relatively few. She appears most prominently in Diaz’s account and in the accounts of the Tlaxcalans, but even in those there is only so much that can be gathered. Townsend at least does a good job collating these various sources; at times she does engage in somewhat critical analysis of these scattered traces. At other times she seems to take the literary traces at face value.

In the introduction she promises to employ ethnographic material to further elucidate Malintzin’s life; while some of this promised material appears, one suspects that much more could have been done with it. Certainly there is no great theoretical rigor, which is perhaps in part due to the projected audience of the book, though again one wonders how broad of an audience an academic title like this can reach. There is but one Amazon review, a not very good indicator for a book already four years old. It’s a pity, really- Malintzin (or Dona Marina, or Malinche) has to be one, if not the most engaging and fascinating of the great cast of characters in the period of the conquest. Her life invites a novelistic or imaginative approach, and while Townsend- like many other academic writers who take this path- sometimes descends to rather maudlin scenes, overall, when examining Malintzin’s place in the story, gives a decently imaginative and sympathetic account. At times Malintzin disappears, the reader wondering where exactly she has gone (have her choices run out? Are things finally fixed?). Yet she does continue to reappear, even in the final two chapters, where perhaps the strange and uncertain genealogy that Malintzin and her descendants bore- from one culture and kingdom to another, never quite fitting in anywhere yet often triumphing (or seeming to triumph at least).

I could bring up other problems- I suspect much more could be asked about the practices and ranges of action and meaning that Malintzin could draw upon in the course of her travels, as she rose to a degree of prominence few, men or women, indigenous or Spanish, in her world could claim. At any rate, Townsend has not exhausted what can be said about this genuinely (to my eyes at least) remarkable woman. Granted, much of what she did can be understood as falling within possible and accepted parameters within both indigenous and Spanish society. Nonetheless, it is hard not to feel the sort of admiration and even love that Diaz and apparently many others felt- admiration and love that continued to echo long after her death, that continues (mingled with hatred and rejection to be sure) to echo down to us, these long centuries later.

The date in Krippner-Martinez’s title rather belies the actual content of the book. His study is as much about post-conquest, post-sixteenth century constructions and memories of the conquest and the early period of Spanish control of Michoacan, as it is about the period itself. While the book is composed of what Krippner calls ‘autonomous essays,’ they all have the unifying theme of a close reading and questioning of various constructed records of the past- some of them created long after the described events. Many of the archives and narratives Krippner examines operate out of a colonial matrix, something he is intent to demonstrate; because of the location of these narratives, even when they include indigenous or otherwise dissenting voices, Krippner argues, they are only speaking through the medium of the conqueror.

While this is not a new argument, obviously, and Krippner is not the first to subject the materials he covers to such a reading, the usefulness of the studies he includes lies in their questioning of even those aspects of the Spanish conquest and post-conquest that would at first glance seem to contradict the general thread of violence and exploitation. Krippner argues that even the Franciscans and such seemingly revolutionary clerics as Vasco de Quiroga are also part of the process of Spanish conquest and consolidation of power. While they may modify and even critique elements of the process, they are integral to it, and do not question the basic propriety of Spanish control of the ‘New World.’ Likewise, Krippner argues, depictions of ‘aberrant’ conquistadors, like Nuno de Guzman, serves to reinforce the basic rightness of the conquest. de Guzman and those like him become explanations of evil and excessive violence; their depraved behavior, distinct from the wider process of conquest, is aberrant and therefore not to be identified with the larger project. Against this Krippner argues that even men like de Guzman were a part of the process, and their violence in fact necessary for it to succeed. Far from being aberrant, they were a integral part- both in what they actually did, and the narrative role they later served in justifying and defending the conquest itself.

Krippner however is as much concerned with how these events were looked at in later years- from the 18th chronicle of Pablo Beaumont to contemporary understandings and uses of the figure of Vasco de Quiroga. The figures and events of the conquest and its immediate aftermath continue to be employed for a wide variety of actors, from conservative Catholics to their anticlerical opponents in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary periods. These constructions, Krippner contends, can tell little about the past itself, but reveal much about the ways the past can be employed. A figure like de Quiroga, in particular, lends himself to discovery and reconstruction, from the understanding of his ideological standing to the literal physical location of his bones. Much like de Quiroga’s bones- which underwent a spectrum from neglect to pseudo-scientific investigation to honored veneration- the events of the conquest and its later memory has undergone many transformations, and continues to be an object of use, of contestation, and deeply-held memory and emotion.

1. Did you know: the appearance of things shifts with the ground you stand on. As we move from the single narrative of a Cortes or Diaz, from the one to the many of other Spanish accounts and the diverse indigenous accounts of the conquest(s) of Mexico and Guatemala, things become much more complex, more disorienting. We are not sure if we are on the same ground, the same field of battle, the same narrow stone causeway before a Maya city, as we were a couple narratives ago. It makes a great difference whether your experience of, say, the conquest of Guatemala ends in a governorship, or in a poorly-attended to settlement far from home, spurned by your supposed allies.

Things that seemed so important recede from view and others take their place; the ‘local’ supersedes the grand tale; or, rather, everything is revealed as ‘local,’ as particular. Knowing the boundaries, the markers, of your narrative, knowing what plot of ground you are standing on: this makes all the difference in the world, as much for understanding these multiple coexisting pasts as describing a wood lot or house plot. And the boundaries, like Pasquala Chi’s forested lands, are themselves marked with ruins and edges of other things, promises of what lies behind the text before us, what lies beyond the bounds, under the overgrowth, between the lines.

2. Did you know: things do fall apart and come back together and fall apart again. Some things matter more than others: the Spanish may keep local hierarchies intact, but it is not the same thing, is it? And perhaps many things can be tolerated- empires expand and contract, after all, and who can know the way things will work out after all. But some things matter a great deal more: the congregacion, for instance, does something especially troubling. It opens up questions that are painful to answer: ‘When he comes to settle, will there be a house already there for him? And wheover settles on his land, will e not also apropriate for himself the fields? Where will he work land if they are entirely lost to him? And if he thus leaves behind his maize, chia, or cactus fruit, and his burial grounds, who will guard them for him? Will he not lose whatever he leaves behind?’ Gods can come and go, altapatl to cabildo, so be it- but the land, the mothering soil and seed and stock. This is something more, isn’t it?

3. Did you know: there are thin traces, like the beloved’s old campsite in the desert, running through all these texts. From the vivid quietly solemn and joyful dialogue for land from St. Michael, to the equally vivid and sorid tales of murder and hit-jobs gone awry, there are people, great and small, whose names and not much else- a story, a list of things, lands, relationships briefly mentioned- spread a narrow trace over the desert of the past. Some are especially poignant, even coming in unlikely places; you can almost feel the trace, or at least think you can: ‘Here is another person, named Martin Itzcuin, from Mexicatzinco. His wife is named Ana Teiuc; their children are no longer alive. They came fifteen years ago. They live together with Catalina. All they did was try to make a living. He says: “Let us be given a field on which we will pay tribute, we will not go back to our hometown, since we came [here] a long time ago.’

4. Did you know: sometimes you wake up and realize how strange much of this must have been, at least at first, how fresh and foreign and yet familiar these events and processes and people appear. Cortes dressing up in feathers and golden ornaments; Japanese envoys escorted by a monk strolling through the streets of a rebuilt Mexico City; priests dug up out of the mountains offering children to rain deities. And so much familiar: squabbles in cabildos, power struggles in households and among neighbors, professions of faith and hope in the face of death.

As for more specific topics, a few thoughts and some possible analogues with my own fields of study. I found his concept of Double Mistaken Identity fascinating and perhaps useful in my own examinations of Islamic interactions with non-Islamic peoples in the first several centuries of Islam. In the aftermath of the Arab futuh of Christian and Persian lands, there are various points at which Muslims express what they think to be a correct understanding of ‘indigenous’ forms but are in fact their own particular concepts projected over others, something that becomes particularly acute after the invasions of the Indian subcontinent. Likewise, initial Christian encounters with Islam necessitate a reaction and contextualization of the new religion; in many cases Christians carry operate on the premises of mistaken identity, whereby they fit Muhammad and his book and religion into pre-existing Christian categories, through which, in some ways, they are able to explain and cope with the presence of the new rulers and their faith. It’s not an exact fit, of course, with what Lockhart is describing, but I think his model is potentially useful elsewhere. As he notes, the dynamics of cultural interchange and clash are not unique to Latin America, but are in some ways global.

Another close analogue with Christian-Islamic interactions, and one with Lockhart does not develop in detail, is the reaction of Franciscans and other Spanish ecclesiastics to Nahuatl texts, which Lockhart describes as coming from both their desire to indoctrinate the indigenous, but also a genuine interest and love of the indigenous languages and literature.  Here the connection is perhaps in fact genealogical: I was immediately reminded of Western medieval Christian reactions to the Qur’an and Islamic literature, as examined by Thomas Burman in his Reading the Qur’an in Latin Christendom. Burman looks at a wide range of reactions to and uses of the Qur’an and its translation from Arabic to Latin, including translators who seem to be interested in Arabic and the Qur’an because they genuinely find it interesting. Burman also examines the role of Arabic-speaking Muslims in aiding Latin Christian translators, and the ensuing traces that result in their translations. Some translations, long dismissed as paraphrases, are in fact reflective of Islamic exegetical traditions, as transmitted either through Christian translators’ contacts with Muslims or familiarity with their exegetical literature. Likewise, it seems from Lockhart’s analysis of the Spanish translation of the Florentine Codex that a similar process is very much at work, with native speakers aiding in the meaningful rendering of the Nahuatl texts into Spanish, and not simply literal equivalence.

Finally, I find Lockhart’s discussion of ‘resistance’ particularly useful vis-a-vis the Islamic conquest of Eastern Christian lands. While it can be tempting to impose modern constructions of resistance and colonialism upon these settings, as Lockhart argues, such an imposition is ultimately anachronistic and does little justice to the complex realities ‘on the ground,’ where cultures- on all sides- were not static, nor universally impacted in the same ways, but experienced a process of give-and-take, with varying levels of exposure to Spanish forms and action, varying levels of adaptation and use, and some manifestations- sporadic and rooted in indigenous institutions- of violence against Spanish rule, though not as ‘resistance’ in the sense some would like to find. Rather, these acts of ‘resistance’ were themselves manifestations of concerns for ‘ancient liberties’ and other forms of privilege ultimately rooted in indigenous polities and social forms. Here as elsewhere the dynamic of Double Mistaken Identity allowed for the penetration by Spanish authorities and forms of indigenous organizations, while the relative autonomy of those organizations and institutions since the seeming penetration was so often only surface deep. Beneath the surface life could go on in ways not terribly unlike before. At the same time, though, the impact of Spanish culture and administration did not decrease, but gradually increased the pressure on indigenous institutions and culture, including language- as exemplified by Lockhart’s three stages theory. In the end, Spanish culture would deeply transform much of indigenous life- but not overnight, and not through sudden ‘conquest.’

William Prescott’s epic volume History of the Conquest of Mexico has all sorts of things going on within its unending pages of flowery prose and alternating paeans to Mesoamerican advancements and the glories of the Spanish conquistadors who so magnificently subjugated the proud ‘barbarians’ and usurped or destroyed the accomplishments of these ‘barbarian’ peoples. But instead of looking at larger narrative arcs- such as the exaltation of the heroism of Cortes- I want to think through, if only heuristically, some of the motifs that appear again and again in Prescott’s grand story, motifs which go a long ways, I think, towards understanding the ways in which Prescott’s understanding of history operates and unfolds in his epic tale.

The very flowery nature of his prose underscores the sheer literal floweriness of much of his descriptive passages. They burst with colour and vibrant vegetation, as he traces the lines of the trees, naming different species and sometimes describing them in further detail; he fills out the mass of the jungle, the forest, the plains; revels in the luxuriousness of the tierra caliente. If Diaz’s narrative was replete with sensory signifiers- smell, sight, taste even- Prescott zooms in on the details of the landscape in particular, drawing a striking contrast to the Spartan descriptions of Cortes. Likewise, in drafting the textual record of the landscape as a whole, Prescott engages in minute detail, carefully describing what we can recognize as ecological zones along the route of the Spaniards’ journey.

While this exuberance of description no doubt conveys multiple levels of meaning and can be attributed to various influences, paramount is its role in shaping for our historian the nature of the human inhabitants of the land, themselves shaped in his understanding by the landscape, the climate, even the vegetation. The banana plant, for instance, due to its ease of cultivation and use, encourages laziness. The Spaniards, upon arriving in Cuba, become more martial and hot-blooded, literally, due to the great heat and humidity of the land. This in turn contributes to the Conquest, even if it does not entirely explain it. Perhaps the greatest juncture of geographical determinism, however, lies in Prescott’s painting of the Tlaxcala, the proud and quasi-Northern European at times inhabitants of an out-and-out ‘Republic.’ Having described  the alpine- and hence Northwestern-Europe like- setting of Tlaxcala, Prescott writes:

But, although the bleak winds of the sierra gave an austerity to the climate, unlike the sunny skies and genial temperature of the lower regions, it was far more favourable to the development of both the physical and moral energies. A bold and hardy peasantry was nurtured among the recesses of the hills, fit equally to cultivate the land in peace and to defend it in war. Unlike the spoiled child of Nature, who derives such facilities of subsistence from her too prodigal hand as supersedes the necessity of exertion on his own part, the Tlascalans earned his bread- from a soil not ungrateful, it is true- by the sweat of his brow… His honest bread glowed with the patriotism, or local attachment to the soil, which is the fruit of its diligent culture; while he was elevated by a proud consciousness of independence, the natural birthright of the child of the mountains. Such was the race with whom Cortes was now associated for the achievement of his great work. (226-7)

If the montane world of Tlaxcala was good for republican virtues and hence made for proper allies for heroic European conquerors, the Europeans themselves were not immune from climatic determination:

The ordinances then prohibit all blasphemy against God or the saints; a vice much more frequent among Catholic than Protestant nations, arising, perhaps, less from difference of religion than physical temperament- for the warm sun of the South, under which Catholicism prevails, stimulates the sensibilities to the more violent expressions of passion. (446)

Climate is not the only determining marker for Prescott. Even more consistently, skin colour emerges- not as an overt construction, laid out explicitly by Prescott, but emerging in the course of his pages- as a key factor in determining barbarity and civilization. When compared to the narratives of Cortes and Diaz, one is struck by the frequency in which the Spaniards are referred to, not just as Spaniards, Castilians, or Christians (though those terms do appear frequently), but as whites. They are white in contradistinction to the ‘dusky’ colour of the ‘natives’; the starkness of the difference is most on display when the white bodies of sacrificed Spanish prisoners are on display, bright against the dark background of indigenous savagery. White is white, even if there are distinctions within European peoples (for instance, the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ settle the New World for the love of liberty, unlike the somewhat lower Spaniards and their sun-enriched hot-bloodedness). For Prescott, the demarcation into white and non-white is not, probably, an especially conscious decision; it is simply a map upon which he can understand the world. This becomes all the more important as Prescott sometimes finds it difficult to keep his distinction between ‘barbarian’ and ‘civilized’ from collapsing in so much irony.

This irony continually threatens the distinctions within the book, from the very beginning, as Prescott describes the history of Mesoamerica pre-Conquest, showing the many accomplishments of the various peoples there, accomplishments which continue to appear up to the very end of the narrative. However, we are also made to know that these are not truly civilized people- rather, they are somewhere on the scale of ‘Orientals’- but only particular Orientals:

In surveying them we are strongly reminded of the civilization of the East; not of that higher, intellectual kind which belonged to the more polished Arabs and Persians, but that semi-civilization which has distinguished, for example, the Tartar races, among whom art, and even science, has made, indeed, some progress in their adaptation to material wants and sensual gratification, but little in reference to the higher and more ennobling interests of humanity. (292)

The Aztecs, in particular, have many hallmarks of civilization: urban society, complex governance, a developed religion, intricate markets and a fairly advanced economy, extensive agriculture. Yet they are still barbarians; and the further into the fight the Spanish plunge the more the word ‘barbarian’ resounds. Prescott does not hide the splendours of the Aztec and other civilizations; but he continually drops them down below the level of the Spanish, and stubbornly maintains this distinction, even as he cannot fully embrace the Spaniards. As he notes, their desire for conquest is driven by a decidedly archaic approach to warfare, fueled by religious zeal. Prescott several times- accurately enough, one might argue- presents the Conquest as an extension of the Crusades; for him, the religious fervor and intention of the Conquistadors is genuine enough, but evidence of a less advanced age. He cautions the reader against judging the Spaniards upon modern standards; still, the fact remains that the Spanish, Cortes even, can come across as something less than civilized, and the irony of them being the bringers of civilization to what appear to be already civilized cultures can become quite heavy.

Prescott presents, as chief among his qualifiers for non-civilization, the Aztec practice of human sacrifice, and the degrading impact he argues it has upon wider culture. ‘Superstition’ is the great inhibitor of civilization, and the leading indicator of barbarism. Yet- the Spanish, by Prescott’s lights, have their own grave problems with superstition, and hence the appeals to not judge them. The use of religion and superstition as markers of barbarism is further problematized by Prescott’s insistence (in a manner oddly reminiscent- though perhaps not genealogically connected- to the Spaniards’ own arguments) that Aztec religion is not intrinsic to their ‘true selves,’ that it is somehow an epiphenomenon that can be detached and replaced with a more ‘enlightened’ and ‘progressive’ form of religion or philosophy. Indeed, Prescott espouses, towards the end of the story, a very explicit belief in the inevitability of progress- progress which can manifest itself anywhere, in anyone. Still- the barbarians, at least in this narrative, are always barbarians, even when the ‘convert’ and becomes allies of the Spanish. And the civilized peoples- even when they are hot-blooded, throwbacks to the Middle Ages, and bound by superstitions themselves- are always civilized. Much of the narrative and analytical tension and movement in Prescott’s history is devoted to the resolution of this sticky- and potentially disastrous- problem. Natives and conquerors, whites and dark-skinned: even in Prescott’s story, the lines are not as clear as they should be. For one final instance: sex between whites and non-whites is nearly invisible in Prescott. Yet we are made to know that it happened, for towards the end of the narrative Prescott must mention Cortes’ ‘natural son’ by Dona Marina, even as he does not speculate or elaborate upon the how of this progeny. The crossing between civilized and barbarian, the blending of white and dark, is there, almost- but not entirely- silent in the text, almost- not quite- swallowed in the massive sea of prose and heroics.