Colors of Conquest: Perceptions of Gold, Whiteness, and Skin in Mexico's Early Colonial Histories

Abstract

This essay proposes that early colonial (sixteenth-century and early seventeenth-century) narratives of the conquest of Mexico offer a prism through which to view the meeting of chromatic perceptions from both Indigenous Mesoamerican and Spanish cultures, particularly as those perceptions apply to gold and skin. Recent literature on the pre-Hispanic cultures of Mesoamerica has provided important new understandings of the social and cosmological meanings of specific body paints among Indigenous Mesoamerican communities. Meanwhile, medievalists have increasingly focused on visual and literary expressions of epidermal colorism—the racialized perception of skin color—in premodern Christian Europe. Scholars of colonial Latin America have also studied expressions of epidermal colorism in the meeting of Old World and New World populations, yet those studies largely take as their point of departure the visual articulation of a castas regime in the eighteenth century. However, in Mexico's early conquest narratives, written in Spanish and Nahuatl, observations regarding the color of skin and precious materials attest to a confluence of Spanish and Mesoamerican ways of seeing color. From this confluence of chromatic perspectives, a critical Indigenous positionality emerges in relation to the narrow valorization of gold and whiteness.