Conquered Conquistadors: The Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, a Nahua Vision of the Conquest of GuatemalaBajo el signo de la compulsión: El trabajo forzoso indígena en el sistema colonial yucateco, 1540 – 1730

Abstract

University faculty in the United States sometimes like to think of this country as the place that produces the best scholarship in the world, including scholarship on colonial Spanish America. These two fine, groundbreaking monographs remind us that this is not always so. Both books are based on doctoral dissertations and were written and published in the Netherlands and in Mexico by young scholars from those countries (Florine Asselbergs and Gabriela Solís Robleda, respectively). Both inspire us to rethink our views on key historical developments among Nahuas, Mayas, and Spaniards in the Maya area (Guatemala and Yucatán).Quauhquechollan is in Central Mexico, east of Mexico City. The Quauhquecholteca allied with the Spaniards in 1520, during the Spanish-Aztec war, after which they were assigned in encomienda to Jorge de Alvarado. When the invasion of highland Guatemala by Jorge’s brother, Pedro, stalled in 1527, Jorge led a second invasion of Spaniards and their Nahua allies. There were as many as ten thousand native warriors in this campaign, among them hundreds of Quauhquecholteca. Most died in fierce fighting against the Mayas. The survivors, however, settled in the new Spanish capital of Santiago (today’s Antigua), where in the early 1530s they produced a large pictorial account of their military migration to — and victories in — Guatemala. This extraordinary document, the Lienzo de Quauhquechollan, Asselbergs surmises was created and publicly displayed to promote community identity among the Quauhquecholteca in Santiago, as well as to “proclaim the legitimacy of their claim to the status and privileges of conquistadors” (p. 224). A copy was sent back to Quauhquechollan and eventually wound up in Puebla, where in 1892 what is now the earliest extant copy was made.The cloth lienzo, close to eight meters square, is reproduced in full color as a foldout insert at the back of the volume. It is a Mesoamerican-style map, complete with place-glyphs, geographical features, and individual Spaniards, Nahuas, and Mayas engaged in various activities centered on migration, battle, and settlement. There is no written text; alphabetic glosses added beneath place-glyphs have become illegible. Consequently, it was long assumed that the map depicted conquest events in Central Mexico. Asselbergs is thus the first scholar to identify the map as depicting the Quauhquecholteca invasion of Guatemala and to offer an accurate, detailed, and fully contextualized analysis of the document.Asselberg’s book, however, is far more than an art-historical analysis of a single map. Her discussion of the lienzo is so thorough and clearly presented as to make her study possibly the best book yet published on the Spanish (or Spanish-Nahua) conquest of Guatemala. Through this study, the conquest of Guatemala becomes more multidimensional that it has ever been; we are given for the first time the 3-D version of events. Jorge de Alvarado looms large as the predominant Spanish conqueror of Guatemala, not his brother Pedro; 1527 – 29 emerges as the crucial period of the conquest, not 1524 – 27; and above all the Nahua allies become real, detailed figures and not just the anonymous battle fodder mentioned in passing by the Alvarado brothers. The book even adds a little more depth to our view of the resisting Kakchiquel, Quiché, and Tzutujil Mayas, despite the fact that they are given less attention than the Spanish and Nahua invaders whom they battle for most of the 1520s.Conquered Conquistadors begins with an introduction to the cartographic genre of the lienzo (chapter 1), a brief discussion of theory and method (chapter 2), and a background history of Quauhquechollan (chapter 3). The reader is then taken through a description of the lienzo (chapter 4) and an excellent account of the Spanish-Nahua invasion of the 1520s (chapter 5). There follows the core analysis of the map in a series of chapters (6 – 9) that examine its pictorial codes, offer an interpretation of its purpose and meaning, lay out its structure and rhetoric, and compare it to the parallel lienzos from Tlaxcala and Analco.To me, one of the most important features of Asselberg’s book comes at the end, in the 25 appendix pages of transcribed documents, mostly petitions and letters by Nahuas, Spaniards, and Mayas found by the author in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville (AGI). These alone are a major contribution to conquest history.Asselbergs does well to highlight the contrast between the lienzos and accounts written by Nahuas later in the sixteenth century, for this contrast helps us to grasp more fully how the Spanish Conquest was possible and why Nahuas participated in it. In the 1530s, the Quauhquecholteca presented the conquest “as an event predicated on the initial combination of Spanish and indigenous forces, and as a continuation of pre-Hispanic processes . . . the Quauhquecholteca and Tlaxcalteca did not consider themselves conquered. They were conquistadors” (p. 224). Within the framework of references available to them at the time, the Nahua perspective was logical; they could also see what the Spaniards surely knew but chose to ignore: that invasions such as the Spanish one of Guatemala in the 1520s would have failed were it not for heavy Nahua participation. But Nahua perspectives and expectations also set them up for “an enormous disillusionment following the conquest period”; in ways that were cruelly clear only in hindsight, “Mesoamerica changed forever” (p. 224).Meanwhile, north of highland Guatemala in the Yucatán Peninsula, a similar tale unfolded. Invading Spaniards brought an easy devastation, but their campaigns stalled or failed. The whole peninsula could not be subdued, and a colonial enclave was only made possible by the participation of Nahua warriors and Yucatec Maya lords styling themselves as “conquistadors.” As in the highlands, expectations were soon dashed, and a kind of disillusionment settled in on Maya lords and Spanish conquerors alike, a disillusionment driven by the dismal fact that — in the words of Yucatán’s senior clergy to the king in 1636 (used by Solís Robleda as an epigram to her book) — “here, sir, your majesty has no other wealth nor treasure than the Indians, and only those that can be procured and kept with ease and good treatment [Aquí señor, no tiene su majestad otra hacienda ni otro tesoro sino los indios, y éstos son los que se han procurar conservar con suavidad y buen trata-miento]” (p. 5).In a sense, then, Bajo el signo de la compulsión acts as a sequel to Conquered Conquistadors; one helps to explain how the conquest occurred, the other helps to explain how Spaniards maintained colonies in regions where Maya subjects were the sole source of wealth. Solís Robleda views colonial Yucatán through the lens of “forced indigenous labor,” specifically “personal service and the system of forced contracts known as repartimiento” (p. 34). The significance of unpaid Maya labor and the repartimiento is not new to Yucatec historiography, but Solís Robleda is the first scholar to present a study this thorough and detailed, particularly one focusing on the early to midcolonial period; furthermore, her AGI sources are vast and daunting and have deterred many a less tenacious scholar than Solís Robleda.She begins with the rough imposition of personal service demands by Spanish conquistador-settlers in the 1540s and ends with the culmination of Bishop Gómez de Parada’s reforms in 1730. But the book is more thematic than chronological, giving some attention to mid-sixteenth-century origins but focusing overwhelmingly on the 1660s – 1720s period. Hefty, like its sources (over four hundred pages and more than a thousand footnotes), Bajo el signo de la compulsión is divided into four large chapters. The first tackles the complex and contested system of compulsory personal service. The key to this was the way in which every individual Maya municipal community was tied to the institutions of the church, the provincial government, and, most importantly, the encomienda — “ties that gave a foundation to the integrated circuit of the colonial system” (p. 104).The second chapter deals indirectly with Maya labor in that it analyzes the system of forced sales of goods, showing how profoundly the colonial economy was rooted in the exploitation of Maya producers. Both collaboration (by Maya cabildo officers) and force were crucial to this system, which became increasingly onerous during the seventeenth century. Solís Robleda presents a vivid illustration of this fact in a table comparing the town-by-town repartimiento demands for cloth and wax set forth by governors Flores de Aldana in 1667 – 69 and Urzúa y Arizmendi in 1700. Flores de Aldana had been condemned by a royal judge for abuse of office and ordered to pay restitution to Maya communities, and yet Urzúa y Arizmendi’s repartimientos were the greater of the two. Echoing Robert Patch’s characterization of late colonial rural Yucatán as a sweatshop, Solís Robleda concludes that “the forced nature and frequency of repartimientos converted Indian villages into virtual textile mills,” obliging Mayas “to work unceasingly” (p. 178).Chapter 3 examines the reforms of Bishop Gómez de Parada in the 1720s; its well-documented battles allow Solís Robleda to dissect how Spaniards justified forced labor. Debate was especially fierce over obligatory domestic service, which Spaniards highly valued and claimed to be vital to the colony’s existence but which the bishop denounced as contrary to “liberty as an innate condition of the Indians” and not redeemed by any “public utility and common good,” unlike road building, for example (Solís Robleda’s words, p. 36). Especially effective is Solís Robleda’s three-page table identifying the bishop’s main points and Governor Cortayre’s responses.These first three chapters would themselves have made a solid monograph, so Solís Robleda is to be applauded for resisting the temptation to stop there. Her final major chapter is arguably the most important, as it tackles the difficult issues of Maya collaboration and resistance; after all, while Spanish positions for and against the mechanisms of colonial exploitation are easily grasped and their protagonists often predictable (governor vs. bishop, for example), it is harder to see how Mayas both made the system work and fought against it.In her examination of what she calls “the indigenous dynamic,” Solís Robleda shows how Mayas were prevented from making common cause through the integration of each community into local (rather than colonywide) manifestations of the system, while the interstitial role of the Maya elite further divided the indigenous majority. This classic divide-and-conquer strategy was reinforced by an equally well-used carrot-and-stick response to acts of resistance; these acts, from petitions of protest to the flight of whole villages, were treated locally with a combination of punitive reactions and negotiated concessions, but the system itself was never seriously reformed until the 1720s — and still persisted for another century (as she outlines in a colophon).Both Asselbergs’ and Solís Robleda’s monographs offer original analysis of important archival materials to detail how the conquest and colonial experiences of indigenous peoples in Yucatán and Guatemala were unique in certain ways; in this sense, these are books for specialists of colonial Mesoamerica. Yet both authors do an effective job of pointing to the larger significance of their sources and conclusions, helping us to better understand the greater drama of European-indigenous interaction in the Americas; in this sense, these books should appeal to a wider specialist audience.