The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492-1700

Abstract

Although it is still a comparatively new branch of history, food history has joined the canon of scholarly endeavors. Likewise more and more historians have started to study the body. Rebecca Earle joins these two currents together in a superb and highly original monograph. While many scholars have examined the things people ate or how they thought about their bodies, Earle’s monograph explores how people thought about the connection between their bodies and the food they consumed. Perhaps because of its topic, the book covers a wide swath of territory and a long period of time. Earle does not restrict herself to one colony but rather conceives of her focus as “the Indies” and takes in both the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Earle’s book centers on a rethinking of the ways that humoral theory influenced how the Spanish dealt with the new experiences that were part of their colonial ventures. She takes humoral theory out of the history of medicine and shows its relevance for other areas of investigation. When confronted with people who were different from themselves, the Spanish used humoral theory to explain these dissimilarities. They argued that the appearance of Amerindians was due to the fact that they ate mostly root vegetables and fish, “cold” foods, as opposed to wine and wheaten bread. Even though they were not framed as such, these arguments were essentially early conceptualizations of racial difference. The Spanish men who were on the front lines of colonization wanted to understand why these people they encountered, although they shared with the Spanish common ancestors in Adam and Noah (an accepted truth derived from religious teachings), looked so different. The explanation derived from humoral theory — that their physical difference was related to diet and climate — was actually quite disturbing for these settlers. They asked themselves whether they too would come to look like the Arawaks, for example, if they ate manioc and lived in the Caribbean. Historians have assumed that colonizers insisted on eating foods familiar to them even though very often this diet was hard to replicate in the colonial climates because these fares were not only customary but also conferred a certain amount of prestige to the consumer. What Earle’s book opens up is the notion that European insistence on a familiar diet also had other rationales. The Spaniards that she documents were terrified that consuming indigenous foods would make them into something other than Europeans. They asked themselves: Would their skin color change? Would the men lose their wonderful beards? Would the nature of their character alter?The components of the Spanish diet also had important religious connotations. Obviously, wheat and grapes were central ingredients in bread and wine, which were also vital parts of the sacrament of Communion. In addition, priests consecrated olive oil for sacraments such as baptism. Planting the seeds for these products was not only a matter of consumption and survival but also a cultural and religious undertaking. In fact, sowing wheat was often referred to in the literature as an allegory for the process of catechizing. Clearly, as has been amply documented elsewhere, the Spanish colonists wanted to remake the natives in their image in terms of not only diet but also work, gender, sexuality, and religion. But Earle adds to this conversation the idea that this attitude was not necessarily a type of chauvinistic automatic response to difference but was part of the religious mission. These attempts to reform and modify native ways were rooted in a mindset that was much more complicated than previously understood.Earle ends her study with a discussion of the ways in which humoral theory and all these notions of diet and identity contributed to the early modern conceptualization of race. This last chapter connects the book to larger themes, ones that are fundamental to understanding the social hierarchies inherent in the colonial world. Earle steps out of her period of study to connect her insights to the caste paintings of eighteenth-century Mexico, which attempted to explain in visual form how racial identities changed and transmuted with the various combinations of parents and children. As she moves away from the core of her subject matter in the chapter on race, her argument seems adrift and certainly not as cogent as in the rest of the book.This book is a highly original study that uses a new and very fruitful methodological approach. Earle’s research is superb and far-ranging. This is certainly a study that specialists of the colonial world, food history, and race should read. It is, however, a book aimed mostly at specialists, and it has an unfortunate stiltedness in its writing. Nevertheless, Earle’s book is an important study and a great contribution to colonial history.