Drinking the fifth cup: notes on the drunken Indian image in colonial Mexico

Abstract

The stereotypical image of the drunken Amerindian in Mexico dates back to the decades following the Spanish conquest of the Aztec state in 1521, and is present in New-Spanish (colonial Mexican) visual culture that was jointly produced by native artists and Spanish friars of the sixteenth century. Along with Spanish religious and historical chronicles of the period, and official colonial documents, these early pictorial works comprise a larger body of historical works that construct the colonial image of the drunken Amerindian. This essay examines the earliest textual and visual evidence that documents drunkenness among New Spain’s native population, and situates these sources in a colonial context in which culturally distinct methods of recording knowledge — native-produced, pictographic images and Spanish alphabetic inscriptions — were combined for Spanish friars and colonial officials to understand the customs and histories of New Spain’s indigenous groups. In particular, this essay critically analyzes the unions and disjunctions between early colonial native manuscript images of intoxication and the Spanish inscriptions that commented on them. It argues that the stereotypical image of the drunken native in New Spain’s early visual record was due not only to the evangelical goals of Spanish friars and the propensity of colonialism to render its subjects as unruly, but also to the complex relationship between European alphabetic text and native-made images, and partial correlations between elite indigenous and Euro-Christian ideologies.