Indigenous Elites and Creole Identity in Colonial Mexico, 1500–1800

Abstract

Peter Villella has provided a welcome addition to the scholarly literature with this longue durée intellectual-cultural history. North American Anglophone scholarship on indigenous histories of Latin America have focused heavily on responses to Spanish rule and Spanish culture. This book seeks to understand, rather, the multidirectional processes of identity formation—Spanish, indigenous, mestizo—in Mexico. In the author’s words, the book “is not a story of one-way memory transmission, but rather of resonance, dialogues, intersections and parallels. The cacique agenda of self-fashioning developed in tandem with creole historiography” (5). Solange Alberro explored similar themes—of the uses by creoles of a heroic indigenous past—in her works Del gachupin al criollo and El águila y la cruz. But Villella’s work is among the first English-language studies to provide a comprehensive analysis of the confluence of indigenous elite self-fashioning and creole constructions of a uniquely Mexican cultural consciousness. To that end, the book offers a geographic complement to the recent (2014) study by Danna Levin Rojo, Return to Aztlan: Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of New Mexico.Elegantly written, deeply researched, and offering an impressive sweep of three centuries, Villella’s book explains how the construction of Mexican historical identities was a complex process of “negotiation within domination” (20), a phrase associated with the book by the same name edited by Ethelia Ruiz-Medrano and Susan Kellogg. Methodologically, this book offers much to consider but most impressive is its wide-ranging use of sources. Unlike many intellectual histories, this book analyzes printed sources but also legal disputes, cacique appeals to the crown, genealogies, and archival material related to negotiation of indigenous privileges.The book begins with the earliest efforts of indigenous caciques to assert their traditional rights as pipiltin, or aristocratic elites. The book then moves from the 1530s through the earliest parts of the nineteenth century. The range of the book is impressive in itself, but it is the execution that impresses the most. Unlike some intellectual histories, Villella’s book moves at a brisk stylistic pace without sacrificing quality analysis. It is, in short, a deeply satisfying book to read.The book has a compelling organization that facilitates its reading. Each chapter takes up a thematic and chronological question. Chapter 2 examines the ways that indigenous caciques who asserted titles and rights placed themselves within the Spanish regalist system as legitimate aristocrats. These caciques stressed the “primordiality of their legacies, their steadfast fealty to the Spanish monarch, and their impeccable Christian orthodoxy” (48). Chapter 3 analyzes the development of Spanish texts about indigenous history from the 1530s to the 1580s, emphasizing the role played by cacique informants in that process. Villella thus places the most famous of these projects, Sahagún’s Florentine Codex, within this broader historiographic process.Remaining chapters follow the decline of the indigenous nobility and the rise of an explicitly Mexican historical-cultural consciousness, even if Villella does not use those precise terms. Chapter 4 discusses “cacique-chroniclers,” the best-known of whom is Fernando de Alva Ixtlixochitl. The study links this tradition with the emergence of creole historiography, notably in the case of Torquemada’s Monarquía Indiana. Chapter 5, focused on the seventeenth century, explains the development of “cacique-hidalgos” especially in light of a growing creole appreciation for the importance of ancient Mexico for the developing baroque cultural consciousness. Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora takes center stage in this self-conscious cultural identity formation. Chapter 6 is focused on the ways that Catholicism was promoted by both creoles and caciques as a strategy of “baroque-era myth-making asserting political and genealogical continuities between New Spain and the native civilizations that preceded it” (187–88). Jesuit Francisco Florencia and doña Beatriz de Tapia (descendant of Otomí conquistadors) figure prominently in this discussion. Chapters 7 and 8 follow the story through the end of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth, reflecting on the ultimate demise of indigenous cacique power in the context of the ultimate Mexicanization of religion and culture.More tightly focused on a specific theme of intellectual-cultural history, the book nevertheless has echoes of The First America, David Brading’s monumental study of creole political consciousness. Even if the latter is more concerned with creoles, Villella’s study seeks to examine the multidirectional process of intellectual and religious acculturation on a multiethnic front. This is an important new kind of intellectual history that helps us to understand the mutual processes of cultural identities forged by indigenous elites and creole sympathizers with indigenous society. Given its felicitous style, the book will find a wide audience—from professional historians to graduate students to undergraduate students and, dare I say it, to lay readers as well.