A Troubled Marriage: Indigenous Elites of the Colonial Americas by Sean F. McEnroe

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Troubled Marriage: Indigenous Elites of the Colonial Americas by Sean F. McEnroe Mark W. Lentz A Troubled Marriage: Indigenous Elites of the Colonial Americas. By Sean F. McEnroe. [Diálogos Series.] (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2020. Pp. xxviii, 319. $95.00 hardcover: ISBN 978-0-8263-6118-9; $34.95 paperback: ISBN 978-0-8263-6119-6.) A Troubled Marriage takes a hemispheric approach to the strategies, successes, and setbacks faced by the upper echelons of indigenous society under Spanish, French, and English rule. Geographically, the book’s protagonists’ origins range from South America to Canada in the Americas. The tactics of military support, marriage alliances, services as intermediaries, conversion to Christianity, and adoption of European-introduced literacy and crafts lent themselves to overall positive outcomes for the indigenous and mestizo figures studied by McEnroe. The author depicts these alliances as a two-way street, emphasizing the Europeans’ dependence on indigenous allies, especially in the early contact period. McEnroe’s monograph spans the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century. The book’s organization balances a chronological arrangement with a thematic approach, with the first chapter dealing with early contacts and the last chapter examining independence. In between, chapters are arranged topically, covering dynastic alliances, religious adaptation, adoption of writing and the arts, urban coexistence with colonizers, and military alliances during and after the conquest. The flexible timeframe for each chapter takes into account the divergent trajectories of contact and colonization of indigenous spaces by separate states and empires. The regions and indigenous leaders examined in this book depend on historical circumstances. Due to the nature of A Troubled Marriage’s subject matter, the book focuses on areas in which an indigenous elite persisted after initial contact and in zones where European colonists had sustained interactions with the indigenous population, which resulted in a documentary record to reconstruct such relationships. Cuzco, Lima, Mexico City, and Tlaxcala figure prominently in the book partly as a result of these sites’ well-preserved original sources and the persistence of a largely literate native elite that left a long paper trail in those locations. To complete a work so sweeping in scope, McEnroe’s archival itinerary included stops in over twenty repositories in six different nations, namely the United States, Canada, Mexico, Guatemala, Peru, and Spain. His expansive bibliography demonstrates engagement with the leading works on the native populations of English and Francophone Canada, the English North American colonies and the United States, Mexico, Peru, and Paraguay. Such extensive research did not result in a dense book, however. McEnroe’s serial biographical organization and his narrative style make A Troubled Marriage easily accessible to the Diálogos Series’ main audience, university classrooms. Individually, most chapters would work as standalone sections to introduce readers to themes for specialized topics classes. [End Page 616] Despite its accessibility, a few editing issues may give some readers pause. Any work so panoramic in its scope covering contact to the nineteenth century from South America to Canada may include a few errors. However, copy editors should have noticed a few glaring ones, such as identifying July 16 as Mexico’s Independence Day (p. 202) or “Lake Eerie” instead of “Lake Erie” (p. 210). Other errors seem to reflect an overall unfamiliarity with Central America, such as his reference to the “Mexico-Honduras border” (p. 7) or describing the indigenous population of Honduras as “neighbors” to the Kaqchikel Mayas of highland Guatemala (p. 180). Indigenous Elites of the Colonial Americas, the book’s subtitle, suggests that the book’s focus will be on indigenous elites. However, while the book covers the “uneasy marriage” between indigenous Americans and Europeans, its subject matter does not exclusively examine the autochthonous population. Many of the biographical sketches include mestizos such as Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, Diego Muñoz Camargo, Diego Valadés, and “the Inca” Garcilaso de la Vega. While these figures played an important role in recording the indigenous past and acting as intermediaries, their European heritage and influences are downplayed, even though some, such as Garcilaso de la Vega, spent much of their lives among Europeans in Europe. Some character studies even focus on Europeans who adopted aspects of...