Promiscuous Power: An Unorthodox History of New Spain

Abstract

This superb volume deserves a place on the short list of books on colonial Latin America that one can give undergraduates, graduate students, professional scholars, and nonacademic friends and expect each to derive both pleasure and profit from it. That list includes Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 by Inga Clendinnen (1987), Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World by Greg Grandin (2014), All Can Be Saved: Religious Tolerance and Salvation in the Iberian Atlantic World by Stuart Schwartz (2008), and Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages by William Taylor (1979), and perhaps a few others.Martin Nesvig's approach is to tell a large story by braiding together a variety of small ones, each based on deep, meticulous research. The book's overarching claim is that Spain's hold over its colonies was tenuous, particularly in the early postconquest years, and that the weakness of the empire afforded its subjects broad scope for crazed shenanigans.The writing throughout is excellent, featuring short, declarative sentences and hard-won, impossible-to-invent vivid detail. Working in the tradition of William Taylor's influential essay “Between Global Process and Local Knowledge: An Inquiry into Early Latin American Social History, 1500–1900” (1985), Nesvig trains his microscope on the lives of intermediaries, generally low-level representatives of imperial power.Chapter 1 deals with the conquest of Michoacán between 1521 and 1538, a horrific period during which Nuño de Guzmán did his best to prove the veracity of the Black Legend, slashing and burning his way through the region in search of loot. The darkness of this story is both relieved and deepened by Nesvig's eye for idiosyncratic detail and for telling departures from historical trends. In syphilitic conquistador Rodrigo Rangel, waking at night bathed in “a lagoon of his own sweat,” covered in sores, and blaspheming to the end, Nesvig gives us a portrait of the conquerors at their most repulsive (p. 36). Through the isolated case of doña Marina Montesdoca, a wealthy heiress of her husband's vast encomienda, Nesvig shows that the world of early Spanish Michoacán was overwhelmingly dominated by men. Nesvig depicts an unsettled colonial society in which conquerors tried to use extreme violence to overcome the tenuousness of their power. Most shared Franciscan Alonso de la Rea's contempt for Native people and belief in the righteousness of coercion: “To deprive someone of their normal and natural tastes,” he wrote of the Chichimec Indians, “can only be done by force” (p. 44).Much of chapter 2, “Burning Down the House, in Which the Spiritual Conquistadors Go to War with Each Other,” is given over to a comprehensive takedown of Vasco de Quiroga, whose supposedly peaceful methods of evangelization are often depicted as an isolated bright spot in a very dark story. Nesvig shows that the darkness of the times infected Quiroga's career as much as anyone's. In a long dispute with mendicant friars financially backed by the encomenderos, Quiroga often had to get his hands dirty, and bloody, to get his way. Nesvig lucidly lays out intricate archival detail to support his larger claims that dissent, political rivalry, moral compromise, and self-seeking were the prevailing themes of the early history of the church in Michoacán.A short review can't do justice to the rich portraits of the sadists, weirdos, losers, and cranks that Nesvig has unearthed in the archives and resurrected in chapters 3 through 6. What is most notable about these chapters is that Nesvig keeps examining these people long after most others would have passed a harsh judgment on them, bringing their complexities and unexpectedly sympathetic traits, the tragedies and ironies of their life stories, into view. In this sense the book brings to mind essays from Bernard Bailyn's Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence (1990), which found affecting human drama in the lives of obscure men.Some may object to Nesvig's lively translation of the blasphemies that he found in the archives. But translating an insult as “thieving, knavish traitor, highway bandit, punk-ass bitch” serves the same purpose as Nesvig's meticulous research, lucid prose, and careful contextualization: it brings the subjects closer to us and brings them alive while respecting the profound alienness of their cultures and times (p. 92).Scholars of colonial Mexico, the Spanish empire, and comparative borderlands should read Promiscuous Power and assign it to students at all levels.