A Troubled Marriage: Indigenous Elites of the Colonial Americas

“His Majesty’s Most Loyal Vassals”: The Indian Nobility and Tuúpac Amaru

Proceeding from a microhistory of local elections at the end of the nineteenth century in one municipality, this article traces the mechanisms of representation and exercise of local power in the Spanish Philippines. Within the colonial apparatus the municipal sphere was one of the few areas of tangible power for the principalia (indigenous elites). The local elites, who were selected by colonial authorities based on political, economic, and religious criteria, played an important role in the fealties and resistances in the colony. This article examines the significance of the Maura Law, or the electoral reforms of 1893, and the obstacles encountered in the eradication of electoral abuse—“moral influence”—that colonial authorities, through action or inaction, had promoted over the years. Keywords: municipal elections • reformS • local power • native elite • Spanish colonialism

Almost six decades ago, Charles Gibson applied his characteristic economy to the task of tracing the trajectory of the Aztec aristocracy through the colonial era. The unique path of this social group led from early and successful attempts to preserve social and economic status to an eventual decline brought about by factors including tributary policies adopted in response to demographic collapse in the sixteenth century. With the exception of Tlaxcala, where cacique families enjoyed remarkable continuity in government well into the eighteenth century, the fate of the Aztec nobility was largely sealed during the first century of Spanish presence.In his engaging and comprehensive Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800, Professor Peter Villella takes the reader beyond this well-established narrative to examine the conditions and strategies that allowed generations of indigenous noble families from diverse ethnic groups to preserve some recognizable guise of their original status under increasingly adverse circumstances. The author painstakingly shows how the Indian nobility developed and exploited its ties to sectors of a creole elite that was still finding its footing in colonial society. Whether through cooperation or rivalry, native and creole elites came to depend on and borrow from each other as they forged their respective self-images and promoted their own agendas. This mutual dependence is evident in each group's use of the indigenous past in its ongoing attempts to legitimize its social place.Borrowing early on from Spanish legal traditions, indigenous elites developed a rhetoric of self-presentation based on exaltation of their lineages, allegiance to the crown, and devotion to Christianity. With slight variations, these basic themes would remain a fixture of arguments that Indian litigants and petitioners made to colonial authorities. For their part, Spaniards who married into the Indian nobility saw the indigenous past as a source of prestige and legitimacy, even when the family in question preserved few if any local cultural traditions. Beginning just after the fall of Tenochtitlan and continuing through and beyond the colonial era, both creoles and Indians revisited the past in response to real or perceived social challenges. This long process gave rise to an impressive corpus of historical writings that reflects the active collaboration of indigenous writers, friars, and creole intellectuals. Professor Villella thus invites us to view Mexican historiography as the product of a close but contentious collaboration between the indigenous nobility and the creole elite.This chronological study is divided into chapters with titles that reflect the social roles that caciques assumed at different stages of colonial history. The reader thus follows their transformation from informants on historical and cultural matters to full-fledged chroniclers and later Hispanized hidalgos, administrators, church patrons, and outspoken defenders of the dignity of indigenous people during the Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century caciques occupied new places in the colonial hierarchy, and they understood two things: adaptation remained vital to their survival, and the old definitions of Indian nobility had long ago lost currency. In this sense, Professor Villella's complex account can be read as an illustration, albeit in the colonial context and with the looming presence of the creole elite, of a notion advanced by European scholars and jurists at the time—namely, that honor and nobility are largely intelligible and commensurate across cultures.Specialized readers will be familiar with some of the documentary sources, episodes, and historical characters that Professor Villella introduces in this book, an unavoidable byproduct of the combination of synthesis and original research (a combination carried out here in particularly compelling fashion). Chapter 4, for example, focuses on the well-known generation of chroniclers that included Juan Bautista de Pomar, Hernando de Alvarado Tezozomoc, and Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl. The author nonetheless brings a fresh perspective to this familiar territory, exploring the ways that these writers and public officers codified many of the themes that would eventually inform nineteenth-century Mexican nationalist thought.Professor Villella's carefully documented account of the circuitous development of Mexican nationalism seems to give David Brading's suggestions greater focus and precision. The study's generous chronological and conceptual span give Professor Villella the space to touch on numerous topics of very recent scholarship (such as honor, indigenous historiography, and Indian conquerors), a convergence that further enriches an already engaging and thought-provoking monograph. Further work remains to be done on the question of how we talk about the indigenous elite in eighteenth-century Mexico, especially when we include a creole counterpart that had already acquired a rather different configuration. Professor Villella's welcome scholarly contribution will surely encourage further research on this and other aspects of the historical evolution of native elites across colonial Latin America.

Almost three hundred mission church-monastery complexes were built in central Mexico from the fall of the Aztec Empire in 1521 to 1600. What did this extensive construction campaign signify? Early historians viewed it as a sign of mendicant zeal: Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians expanding into ever more Indigenous communities and gaining converts along the way. Revisionists rejected this narrative’s triumphalism and instead argued for continuities in Indigenous religion, emphasizing native adaptation of Christianity to fit Mesoamerican religious frameworks. Crewe challenges both interpretations by viewing the Mexican mission as a political and social project more than a religious one. He explores why Indigenous communities invested so much labor in building churches (for it was the Indigenes who actually built them) and how the missions were staffed and funded rather than the ways Indigenous peoples translated Christianity into a Mesoamerican context. This focus results in a set of interrelated arguments that center socially stratified Indigenous communities as primary agents in the missionary endeavor.First, conversion was more a political than religious act. The Native population soon learned that baptism offered a modicum of protection from colonialism’s worst abuses. Spanish conquerors enslaved recently defeated Indigenous populations to profit quickly from their victories. Spanish law, however, prohibited enslavement of Christian subjects. Moreover, missionary friars, though they demanded labor and tribute from their Indigenous flocks, tended to protect them from the settlers’ excesses. Conversion therefore granted Indigenes some defense against colonial demands.Second, mission church construction served to reconstitute Indigenous community in the face of Old World epidemics that killed over 90 percent of the Mesoamerican population during the sixteenth century. Three devastating plagues—in 1521, 1545, and 1576—each killed over a third of the Indigenous populace. Because of this, Native elites began mission-building projects. In fact, the most active construction period began in the 1550s despite population decline. Indigenous elites saw mission building as a way to reassert community identity. The mission church functioned similarly to the precontact teocalli, or temple, which had been the physical manifestation of the altepetl (pl. altepeme), or Indigenous city-state. But the friars had destroyed the temples early in their evangelization. The mission church took over the teocalli’s role as representation of the altepetl by mid-century, and Indigenous elites used churches to reinforce altepetl identity in the face of devastating loss.Third, Native elites built mission churches to proclaim altepetl independence from other city-states. The altepetl was the fundamental Mesoamerican unit of sociopolitical organization, and the Aztec Empire had subjugated hundreds of them. Once the empire fell, altepeme vied with one another for dominance. Friars contributed to these political maneuvers by establishing their first missions in the largest altepeme. This, however, effectively subordinated other city-states to the religious authority and labor demands of the mission altepetl. In part, the spurt of mission building starting in the 1550s reflects the desire of Native elites to assert their independence.The wave of mission expansion ceased by the 1580s. Although Native elites had used church building to reconstitute Indigenous community in response to colonialism and disease, the epidemics at the century’s end decimated the population such that church building was no longer feasible.Crewe offers a fascinating and innovative interpretation of Mexican missionary history that foregrounds Indigenous agency. The book is richly researched and clearly written and presents more arguments than can be addressed in this review. I do think Crewe underestimates the significance of religion in mission building, but he correctly points out that many have addressed this topic already. Crewe’s contributes significantly to the historiography, and scholars of colonial Latin America will welcome his work.

Reviews and Short Notices

Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World

The Portuguese occupied the northern region of South America in the early 17th century. It constituted a separate province of the Portuguese possessions in South America. This province comprised several landscapes, including the vast Amazonian forest in the west and plains in the east. It bordered the other administrative province in Portuguese America, the State of Brazil and also the Dutch, French, and Spanish colonies in the Amazon region. For most of the colonial period, the region became heavily dependent on Indian labor force for agriculture and especially for the exploitation of forest products gathered in the vast Amazonian backlands (the sertão). The role played by Indian laborers (both free and slave), by forest products (known as drogas do sertão), and by the expansion of agriculture and grazing in the eastern plains shaped a centrifugal society and economy. Moreover, the fact that the region bordered Dutch, Spanish, and French colonies transformed the frontier into a central issue of Portuguese policies towards the region.

Modern Mexico derives many of its richest symbols of national heritage and identity from the Aztec legacy, even as it remains a predominantly Spanish-speaking, Christian society. This volume argues that the composite, neo-Aztec flavor of Mexican identity was, in part, a consequence of active efforts by indigenous elites after the Spanish conquest to grandfather ancestral rights into the colonial era. By emphasizing the antiquity of their claims before Spanish officials, native leaders extended the historical awareness of the colonial regime into the pre-Hispanic past, and therefore also the themes, emotional contours, and beginning points of what we today understand as 'Mexican history'. This emphasis on ancient roots, moreover, resonated with the patriotic longings of many creoles, descendants of Spaniards born in Mexico. Alienated by Spanish scorn, creoles associated with indigenous elites and studied their histories, thereby reinventing themselves as Mexico's new 'native' leadership and the heirs to its prestigious antiquity.

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...

This chapter explores the mission of nonconformist and dissenting missionaries throughout the Pacific Islands, including the Philippine Islands. A wide variety of Christian denominations have taken root in the Pacific, as well as a great number of examples of localization and indigenization of Christianity, particularly emerging from the wake of dissenting missionary efforts. So, we ask several questions. What kinds of dissenting mission have there been, especially in the Colonial Era, and now in the post-colonial Era? In what ways have the Pacific Islands and Filipino peoples, as agents in their own right, cooperated, resisted, and indigenized and localized the gospel and the church? Finally, what can we learn from these Protestant/dissenting mission histories that contributes to our overall project in this encyclopaedia; that of analysing and explaining the historical, theological, and missiological dynamics of mission from a particular perspective?

Empires of Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America, 1492-1830. By. H. Elliott. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. 546. Paper, $22.00.)Reviewed by David P. DewarEliga Gould and others are constructing an approach to early modern Atlantic world studies that focuses on entanglements inherent among various competing European empires as they colonized Americas and Caribbean. This approach does not embrace or sanction traditional comparative histories emphasizing political differences between empires. Nevertheless, its adherents recognize that traditional analyses have helped historians discover need to go beyond national narratives and discover effects of metropolitan policy on peripheral people thousands of miles away. For new Atlantic historians, empire is complicated by cultural as well as political interplay. J. H. Elliott engages this approach in his ambitious synthesis Empires of Atlantic World by trying to disentangle threads of each empire's influence upon other. He examines both similarities and differences between early modern world's most prominent imperial forces, but he does so without falling into trap of nationalist narrative.Indeed, without ignoring or dismissing it, Elliott works against entire traditional comparative historiography. He recognizes that Spain and Britain each had unique ambitions and policies that created unique empires, and he uses features of traditional historiography as a starting point to understand ways in which imperial policy was conceived and implemented in separate peripheral political spheres each nation dominated. But Elliott also recognizes distinct limitations that such an approach to comparative history features, one that focuses on national mythologies and legends, for instance, and allows early modern nationstates to create very notion of uniqueness necessary to much traditional comparative history. He argues that any of history and culture of large and complicated political organisms that culminates in a series of sharp dichotomies is unlikely to do justice to complexities of past, but he also points out that an emphasis on too many similarities would be equally reductionist (xvi). Thus, writing a comparative history that does justice to whole is akin to playing accordion, Elliott suggests. two societies under comparison are pushed together, but only to be pulled apart again (xvii). The trick for historian is to end up with music.Elliott creates a symphony. The book is organized so as to recognize effects of cultural miscegenation. Beginning with occupation of North America by Spain and Britain, he continues on to consolidation of empires by means of authority and hierarchy and ways in which resistance to consolidation changed composition of culture. Finally, he analyzes social and cultural dynamics that led newly minted Americans to emancipation from empire.As a scholar of seventeenth-century Spain and, later, of Spanish empire in America, Elliott begins on familiar territory. He discusses ways in which Spain asserted its perceived authority over a variety of people in North America, first conquering native peoples and then inserting settlers to do work of colonization. Elliot contends that English, on other hand, were always 'planters', not 'conquerors' - at least publicly. But Richard Hakluyt elder and others recognized success of Spanish model and opposition posed by Natives, and came to conclusion that conquest would likely have to precede planting (9).After imperial intrusions in New World, Elliott shows ways in which both empires created productive colonies. Monarchs devised methods of establishing law and order and means by which they could supervise structure of society. Elliott argues that full integration of church and state in Spanish empire overcame difficulties created by Council of Indies, which seemed to create built-in conflicts between competing authorities and the numerous opportunities of procrastination, obstruction and graft (129). …

This article discusses the history of sorcery and witchcraft in Spanish and Portuguese America. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Spanish and Portuguese colonizers and missionaries poured into Central and South America, carrying with them their European ideas on witchcraft. While Europeans introduced their notions of sorcery and witchcraft to the Amerindians, they also adopted some indigenous magical concepts and practices. In the second half of the sixteenth century, when numerous Africans were brought to Spanish and Portuguese America, another notion of witchcraft was added to those of Europeans and Native Americans. In the course of the sixteenth century Amerindians, Africans, and Europeans came into close contact, and eventually some features of their different concepts of witchcraft merged into new, hybrid notions.

From the Counting House to the Field and Loom: Ecologies, Cultures, and Economies in the Missions of Sonora (Mexico) and Chiquitanía (Bolivia)

As sixteenth-century Spaniards constructed their global empire, they carried with them the racial-religious concept of “limpieza de sangre,” or blood purity, which restricted marginalized communities from exercising prestige and authority. However, the complex demographic arena of early modern America, so different from the late medieval Iberia that gave rise to the discourse, necessarily destabilized and complicated limpieza’s meanings and modes of expression. This article explores a variety of ways by which indigenous elites in late colonial Mexico sought to take advantage of these ambiguities and describe themselves as “pure-blooded,” thereby reframing their local authority in terms recognized and respected by Spanish authorities. Specifically, savvy native lords naturalized the concept by portraying their own ancestors as the originators of “pure” bloodlines in America. In doing so, they reoriented the imagined metrics of purity so as to distinguish themselves from native commoners, mestizos, and the descendants of Africans. However, applying limpieza in native communities could backfire: after two centuries of extensive race mixing, many native lords found themselves vulnerable to accusations of uncleanliness and ancestral shame. Yet successful or not, indigenous participation in the discourse of limpieza helped influence what it meant in New Spain to be “honorable” and “pure,” and therefore eligible for social mobility.

This article asks how we should reconceptualize decolonization when it is hijacked by authoritarian/fascist forces. It focuses on the notorious Bhima Koregaon case in India in which 16 intellectuals/human rights defenders from across the country were imprisoned without trial as alleged terrorists. It shows how, on the one hand, decolonization is hijacked by the Hindu authoritarian regime and, on the other hand, colonial artifacts are resymbolized by the colonized to oppose oppression by native elites. It urges attention to the questions of who is mobilizing the language of decolonization and why. It argues that the most important anticolonial intellectuals may not use the language of decolonization and may not be in universities, but on the streets, with social movements, and in prison. It proposes that contemporary decolonization debates center processes of domination and oppression created by the state and global capital nexus, processes that are cultural, psychological, political, and economic. These processes are shown to entrench casteist/racist hierarchies, work through Indigenous elites, and create internal differentiation within marginalized communities, eschewing a unitary concept of indigenous ontology/cosmopolitics/worldviews. Calls for an emancipatory politics, such as that of decolonizing anthropology or the university, would be well placed to center these global processes and local nuances.